Socialism and the drink question

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j* g PlOJBtTY OF TH»

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ARTtS SCIENTIA VERITAS

(

the socialist library, vi.

•scj

The Socialist Library — VI.
Edited by J. Ramsay Mac Donald, M.P.

SOCIALISM

AND THE

DRINK QUESTION

BY

PHILIP SNOWDEN. M.P.

If

LONDON:

INDEPENDENT LABOUR PARTY,

23, Bride Lane, E.C.

1908.

S~so
51.7

CONTENTS.

PAGE

I.

The Problem Stated

I

II.

The Temperance Movement

. 18

III.

Labour Organisations and Drink

. 24

IV.

Who Consumes the Drink ? . .

. 34

V.

Causes of Drinking

. 44

VI.

. Social Conditions

- 55

VII.

Other Causes

. 66

VIII.

^Social Reform and Temperance . .

• 7i

IX.

Drink and Economic Poverty . .

. 85

X.

Economics of Temperance

• 94

XI.

State Prohibition

. 109

XII.

Local Option

. 119

XIII.

Disinterested Management

- 139

XIV.

Trust Companies in Britain . .

. 149

XV.

Public Control and Municipalisation .

• 159

XVI.

Municipalisation

. 171

XVII.

Advantages and Objections

. 183

XVIII. Conclusion

. 191

Appendix I.

. 193

Appendix II.

. 196

Appendix III.

. 200

Index

. 202

188908

SOCIALISM AND THE DRINK
QUESTION.

Chapter I.

The Problem Stated.

The obvious evils of the drink traffic have
raised the subject to the rank of a question of
foremost political and social importance.

The results of no other social evil are so
apparent. Gambling may reduce a family to
starvation ; commercial speculation may lead
to ruin ; capitalism, by low wages, may cause
poverty and physical deterioration, and drive
women to shame ; landlordism may be re-
sponsible for the ruin of agriculture and the
degradation of the labourers to the position
of serfs ; but the relation between cause and
effect in these cases is not so obvious and im-
mediate as between drink and the misery,
poverty, ruin, crime, lunacy, disease, and
death which the traffic brings in its train.

The evil effects of drinking cannot be
hidden. They obtrude themselves upon our
attention at every turn. The public house is
everywhere. The reeling and brutalised victims
of drink meet us in the streets ; the slum
areas of our towns reek with its filthy odours. |

Drink pulls men down to the gutter from
positions of honour and usefulness. The
columns of our newspapers are filled with the
stories of debaucheries, assaults, outrages, and
murders done in drink. The time of our police
courts is mainly occupied in hearing cases in
which drink and the public-house figure ; our
prisons have always thousands of inmates,
sent there through drink ; our lunatic asylums
are fed to a considerable extent by drink ;
judges are unanimous in assigning to drink
the responsibility for much of the crime they
have to condemn ; doctors ascribe to drink
much of the physical degeneration of the age,
and regard it as one of the most potent causes
of disease, physical and mental ; the educa-
tionalist and the social reformer find drink to
be one of the chief hindrances in their path,
for it enfeebles the physical strength of the
workers, it saps their independence, it de-
stroys their self-respect, it lowers their ideal
of life, it makes them content in poverty and
filth, it destroys their intelligence, it makes
them the easy victims of every unscrupulous
exploiter who seeks to batten upon them.

A person does not need to be a fanatical
teetotaller to subscribe to the strongest indict-
ment which can be framed against the drink
traffic as one of the greatest curses which
afflicted our country and mankind to-day. 'It
is probably true that the flagrant and obvious
evils which are associated with drink have

3
tended to give an exaggerated conception of
the extent to which it is responsible, as a
primary or isolated cause for the economic,
physical, and moral condition of the people.
The connection between drink and the ap-
parent results is so close to the casual observer
that it is little wonder the Drink Question
should have been raised to the category of a
special social evil — a first cause of many re-
sultant evils, and therefore an evil capable of
independent treatment. It will be one of the
chief objects of this little work to endeavour
to prove that the Drink Question is but one
phase of the Social Problem ; that it cannot
be completely solved apart from the treatment
of the whole problem of the economic and
social condition of the people ; that the Drink
Evil is one of the forms — and perhaps, from
many points of view, the gravest — of waste
— economical, physical, mental, and moral —
which is inherent in our present method of
wealth production and ownership.

The importance of the Drink Question must
appeal to the Socialist for the same reasons
which the questions of landlordism, capital-
ism, competition, housing, education, appeal
to him. The Socialist case for the collective
control of land and wealth production, for
the organisation of distribution, for better
housing and better education, is based upon
the social loss in material wealth, in know-
ledge, in efficiency, in comfort, in health, and

4
in morality which arises from the present
system. The Drink Evil is perfectly analo-
gous. One need not understand deeply the
causes of the waste of commercial competi-
tion, nor of bad housing, nor of the ignorance
of the masses, to appreciate the social loss of
wealth, of health, and of knowledge arising
therefrom. In like manner, leaving for the
moment the question of the cause of drinking,
the Socialist will admit the economic, physical
and moral loss to society from the existence
of the drink traffic.

As the economic aspects of the problem
will demand extensive consideration at a later
stage of our enquiry, we shall in this chapter
consider briefly some of the physical, mental,
and moral ravages of this form of Social
Waste.

Drink and Crime.

In the ten years ending 1905 the number of
prosecutions for drunkenness in England and
Wales was 2,068,725, or an average of over
200,000 a year. In 1906 there were over
100,000 arrests for drunkenness in Scotland.
These figures by no means express fully the
extent to which drink employs our policemen,
police courts, and judges, and fills our gaols
and convict prisons. In addition to these
prosecutions for simple drunkenness, many of
the cases of assaults were the outcome of
drinking. " Drunkenness is no doubt the
cause of many crimes, and is the accompani-

ment of many others."* This is the conclusion
of Sir John Macdonell, Master of the Supreme
Court, who edits the Report of Judicial
Statistics. It is pointed out in his report that
there are many persons drunk when taken into
custody, but the charge of drunkenness is
dropped because the persons are charged with
more serious offences. In Manchester, in 1905,
8,734 persons were drunk when arrested ; but
of this number only 7,626 were proceeded
against for being drunk and disorderly in the
street, the other 1,108 having a more serious
charge made against them.

The figures of arrests for Drunkenness in
one town (Liverpool) will help to convey an
impression of the extent of the evil and the
social waste of wealth and human life caused
by it.
Arrests for Drunkenness in Liverpool^

APPREHENSIONS.

DAY OF THE w^k.

1 90S

I904

Sunday . .

Monday

Tuesday . .

Wednesday

Thursday

Friday . .

Saturday

. • •

•

529
I280
925
764
705
825
2482

SOS
I202
906
863
713
834
2585

Total

75IO

7608

27

* Judicial statistics England and Wales, 1905, P«
f Judicial statistics, 1906, pp. 29 and 30.

6
A tabk giving the ages of the persons
arrested, also relating to Liverpool, is instruc-
tive.*

APPREHENSIONS.

AGE.

I905

1904

Under 16

1

i6to 21

390

379

21 to 30

2211

2252

30 to 40

2263

2304

40 to 50

1566

1639

50 to 60

666

639

Over 60

424

394

Police Court Magistrates, Judges, and
Coroners, whose knowledge and experience
entitle their opinions to respect, are unanimous
in ascribing to, or associating drink with,
much of the crime with which they have to
deal.

Mr. Justice Granthamf says : —
Now, apparently, all this is changed. I have lately
been brought face to face for weeks with the conduct
of publicans in the carrying on of their business, which
has resulted in the most heartbreaking crimes it is pos-
sible to imagine — husbands murdering their wives,
wives their husbands, fathers their sons, friends their
own best friends — all through the maddening influence
of excessive drinking.

Twelve murders, eighteen attempts at murder, and
woundings without number that were just as likely
to have ended in murder as far as the conduct of the
criminal was concerned, have bfeen mine and my brother
Judges' daily fare for the last four weeks in one
circuit ; and, in almost every case, as appeared in

* Judicial statistics, 1906, pp. 29 and 30.
f Letter to Croydon Licensed Victuallers.

7

evidence, drink was the cause— drink served by publi-
cans and not at clubs, and drink proved to have been
served in the public-house, where the man was openly
drunk.

Such testimony might be quoted without
limit, but two other shortly expressed opinions
shall suffice. Lord Chief Justice Coleridge
said : —

I can keep no terms with a vice that fills our gaols,
that destroys the comfort of homes and the peace
of families, and debases and brutalises the people of these
islands.

Mr. Coroner Shepherd, of Gateshead, at an
inquest he attended in June, 1907, said : —

This is the fourth suicide to-day, and three out of
four of these are, there is no doubt, due to drink. Drink,
as far as I can see, appears to be at the bottom of these
cases of suicide.

DRINK, DISEASE AND DEATH.

The growing concensus of conviction in the
medical profession that alcohol is an im-
portant cause of physical degeneration, and
that it causes many diseases, and aggravates
others is a very impressive fact of recent
years.

The attacks by doctors upon drinking
have become so general that the " trade " in
the early part of 1907 felt it to be necessary
to counteract the effect by endeavouring to
obtain a manifesto that " the moderate use of
alcoholic beverages is, for adults, usually
beneficial/ ' signed by a number of well-known
medical men.* The discreditable means

* Lancet, March 30th, 1907.

8
adopted to obtain the signatures were sub-
sequently exposed, and many of the signa-
tories deemed it necessary to explain that
they had signed the document under a mis-
apprehension.

We are not here concerned with the debat-
able question as to whether the " moderate "
use of alcohol as an " article of diet for adults
is beneficial." There will still remain room
for differences of opinion on this point when
there is agreement that the extent to which
alcohol is consumed by a large portion of our
adult population is destructive of physical
health. Upon this latter point there can be no
two opinions. The facts of everyday life put
that beyond the region of controversy.
: But a few statements and statistics may be
cited to show the extent to which alcohol is
responsible for degeneration, disease, and
death, and therefore the loss of social wealth.
The Inter-Departmental Committee on Phys-
ical Deterioration which sat in 1903, after
examining sixty-eight witnesses, reported
that :—

The question of drink occupies a prominent place
among the causes of degeneration. . . . The tendency
of the evidence was to show that drinking habits among
the women of the working classes are certainly growing
with consequences extremely prejudicial to the care
of the offspring, not to speak of the possibility of children
being born permanently disabled. . . . The

Lunacy figures, which were dealt with by Dr. Jones,
show a large, and, in some cases, an increasing number
of admissions of both sexes which are due to drink,

9
and an increase of general paralysis among lunacy
patients tells the same tale. ... A3 the result of the
evidence laid before them, the committee are convinced
that the abuse of alcoholic stimulants is a most potent
and deadly agent of physical deterioration.

So far back as 1887, a Committee of the
British Medical Association enquired into
" The Connection of Disease with Habits of
Intemperance.' ' The Committee stated its
conclusions to be as follows : —

On the whole, then, in addition to the information
that we obtain from these returns as to the alcoholic
habits of the inhabitants of this country, and as to-
the relative alcoholic habits of different occupations-
and classes, we may not unfairly claim to have placed
upon a basis of fact the following conclusions.

1. That habitual indulgence in alcoholic liquors^
beyond the most moderate amounts has a distinct/
tendency to shorten life, the average shortening^
being roughly proportional to the degree of indul- .'
gence.

2. That of men who have passed the age of twenty-
five, the strictly temperate, on the average, live at
least ten years longer than those who become decidedly
intemperate. (We have not in these returns the means of
coming to any conclusion as to the relative duration oi
life of total abstainers and habitually temperate drinkers-
of alcoholic liquors.)

A recently published work* deals at length
with the pre-natal and after effects of alcohol
upon children. It is shown that the alcohol
factor in the parents has influence upon the
children in four great classes of mental dete-
rioration, namely, (1) idiocy and imbecility,

* Alcohol and the Human Body : Sir Victor Horsley
and Dr. Mary Sturge.

(2) epilepsy, (3) feeble-mindedness, (4) mental
deficiency as shown in school-work.

According to the authority of Drs. Shuttle-
worth and Fletcher-Beach, parental alco-
holism is a factor in 16 per cent, of the cases
under their care at the Royal Albert and
Darenth Asylum for Idiots and Imbeciles.
Analysis of 2,380 of their histories shows that
■consanguinity, consumption, epilepsy, mental
disease, etc., in parents, form other factors,
the history of intemperance being associated
with one or more of these in the percentage
above stated.*

It is shown also that parental alcoholism
disposes the offspring to epilepsy. Dr. W. C.
Sullivan conducted an investigation which
showed that of 219 children who had alco-
holic mothers, 4.1 per cent, became epileptic,
whereas in the general mass of the population
the frequency of epilepsy averages below J
per cent. Other writers have found that from
12 to 15 per cent, of the surviving offspring of
alcoholics become epileptic.f

In view of the greater attention now being
.given by educationalists to the treatment of
the mentally deficient child, it is well to
recognise the effect of alcohol as a factor in
the causation of such deficiency. In 1901 a
study of the mental deficiency of ordinary
children was undertaken for the New York

* Alcoholism and the Human Body, p. 321.
t Ibid, p. 322.

II
Academy of Medicine by Dr. MacNicholl.
Fifty-five thousand school children were
examined. Of these 58 per cent, were below
the required standard of intelligence, 17 per
cent, being actual " dullards/ ' 25 per cent.
" very deficient," and the other 16 per cent,
merely deficient. The habits of the parents
with regard to alcohol is reported in 20,147
cases : —

Children of drinking parents . . . . . . . . 6624

,, ,, reported dullards 5 3 p.c.

Children of abstaining parents . . . . ..13523

reported dullards 10 p.c.

The family histories of 3,7*1 children were
traced through three generations. This was
done in great detail with regard to the taking
of alcohol. Of the children of abstaining
parents and abstaining grandparents, only 4
per cent, were " dullards," whereas of the
children of abstaining parents, but drinking
grandparents, 78 per cent, were " dullards."
Dividing the 3,711 children into two classes,
the following results are noted : —

(1) Of those free from hereditary alcoholic

taint —
96 per cent, were proficient,
4 per cent, were dullards,
18 per cent, suffered from some neurosis

or organic disease.

(2) Of those with hereditary alcoholic taint —
23 per cent, were proficient,

77 per cent, were dullards,

12

76 per cent, suffered from neurosis or
organic disease.*

The terrible waste of child life is touching
the public conscience. While sanitation and
the growth of medical science have succeeded
in reducing the general death-rate, the ap-
palling mortality among infants has remained
practically at the same rate for the last quarter
of a century. There are many causes of this
loss of infant life — bad housing, ignorance of
mother, impure milk, poverty — but it is indis-
putable that drink contributes considerably to
the mortality. The effects of alcoholism in
the parent show themselves in many ways
upon the children. Professor Bunge, of Bale,
has carried out prolonged investigations into
the causes of the failure of mothers to suckle
their children, and he makes this startling
declaration"^ : —

There are some cases, and these are not rare, where
the mother, having been able to suckle, the daughter
has not been able to do so. Here we are close
to the causes of the incapacity, and shall find it in

THE FATHER, AND WE AT ONCE ENCOUNTER ALCOHOLISM.

In 78 per cent, of these cases, in my statistics, the
father is an immoderate drinker. On the other hand,
in families where mothers and daughters can suckle
their infants, drunkenness is rare ; in other words,
that the daughter of a drunkard is in a position to be
able to properly suckle her infant in a rare case. The
rule is that, if the father is a drunkard, the daughter
loses her power of suckling.

* Medical Temperance Review, August, 1905.
f Alcoholism and the Human Body, pp. 325-6.

13

The spending of any part of the too inade-
quate income of a working-class family upon
drink deprives the mother, and, through her
or directly, the child, of necessary food. The
mother who drinks is careless and dirty, and
her children are neglected. Overlaying of
infants is a common cause of death. In
London the mean annual number of deaths
from overlaying is 612, and the majority of
these cases occur on Saturday and Sunday
nights — a fact which is obviously suggestive
of the cause.

Sir William Broadbent has said: "The
worst of it is that for every child that dies, a
dozen others are damaged." These "damaged"
infant lives grow up physically and mentally
incapable of fighting the battle of life. They
become the " unemployables " of the labour
market, the loafers of our streets, the inmates
of our hospitals and prisons, and, instead of
being a benefit to the community, they waste
its wealth upon their maintenance and pro-
pagate their own enfeebled species to be a
burden on the next generation. Drink, as a
factor in the physique of our population, is
too influential to be ignored by the reformer.

Further confirmation of the ravages of
Drink, of its influence in wasting human life,
is given in the statistics published by the
Registrar General and by facts in connection
with the experienced Insurance and Friendly
Societies.

14

In 1903 only 1,475 deaths of males and
1,075 of females were returned as caused by
alcoholism, and 3,916 deaths from cirrhosis of
the liver, a disease known to be nearly always
due to drink. These figures, according to Dr.
Newsholme,* greatly understate the real
number of deaths due to these causes, as it is
common for the doctor, out of regard for
the feelings of the relatives, not to assign this
as the cause of death. Cancer and consump-
tion are responsible for 134 out of every 1,000
deaths recorded, and according to Dr. P.
Bronardel, a great French physician, who
spoke at the International Congress on Tuber-
culosis in London in 1902, "Alcoholism is in
fact the most powerful factor in the propaga-
tion of tuberculosis . . . the returns of
mortality from tuberculosis, and the drink
bill of Prance exhibit a strange correspond-,
ence." This view was supported by Dr. Koch,
of Berlin, and Professor Sims Woodhead, of
Cambridge.

The experience of certain Insurance and
Friendly Societies which separate abstainers
from non-abstainers is often quoted, but it will
bear repetition.

* Elements of Vital Statistics.

MORTALITY EXPERIENCE OF FOUR INSURANCE
COMPANIES.

General Section.
(Non-Abstainess').

Ex-

Sected
eaths

Actual
Deaths

Per-
cent-
age.

Abstainers' Section.

Ex-
pected
Deaths

Actual
Deaths

Per-
cent-
age.

United Kingdom
Temperance and
General Provident
Institution (period
41 years, 1866 to
1906)

Spectre Life Associa
tion period of 20
years 1884 to 1906)

Scottish Temperance
Association (period
20 years, 1883 to
1904

13952

2798

319

13188

225

95-4

79.0

70.5

Abstainers' and
General (period 23
years 1884 to 1906)

10889

1794

936

956

7760

967

420

449

71.2

53-9«

44-cV

46.5

From the report of the Public Actuary of
South Australia, Mr. H. Dillon Gouge, F.S.S.,
we give the following : —

Average Rates.

Mortality
per cent

Sickness
Weeks.

Abstainers' Society Average . .
Non- Abstainers' Society Average

0*689
1*381

1*248
2*317

* Expected Deaths under H.M. Table of the Institute
of Actuaries.

t No figures published.

i6

These figures become the more striking
when it is remembered that in the " non-
abstainers " societies are many who are in
fact abstainers.

The experience of our own country bears
out the same conclusions.

On July 17th, 1896, the House of Commons
ordered to be printed a special Report on the
Sickness and Mortality experienced by the
Registered Friendly Societies in the United
Kingdom. When the mortality per cent, for
all the Friendly Societies is compared with
the figures for the Independent Order of
Rechabites — an abstainers' society — it is seen
that the latter society has a very great
advantage.

Lunacy.

Drink, according to the Report of the
Commissioners of Lunacy, is one of the chief
causes of insanity. The figures for 1904
assign intemperance as the cause of insanity
in 227 per cent, of the male admissions
during five years, and 9-4 of the female ; the
rates for private patients being, males 167,
females 8*6 ; and for pauper patients, males
23*6, and females, 9*6. That drink and in-
sanity are closely associated is shown by Dr.
Jones,* the eminent authority on insanity, who
records the fact that no less than 42 per cent,
of all periodic inebriates relate a history of

* Evidence before Physical Deterioration Com-
mittee, Appendix XVI.

17
either drink, insanity, or epilepsy in their
ancestors.

To sum up our indictment of the drink
traffic in relation to social waste we submit
the foregoing facts to prove that the traffic
is largely responsible for murder, suicide,
immorality, and petty crimes ; it is poisoning
the bodies of the children before they are born ;
it sends thousands to the grave before they
have learned to lisp ; it gives to tens of
thousands who survive a shattered constitu-
tion and weakened will ; it pre-disposes them
to every form of illness ; it is destroying the
capacity for motherhood, and weakening the
natural instinct of the mother. It wastes all
this human life, and it involves an incalculable
loss of social wealth through physical in-
efficiency, mental incapacity, and loss of self-
respecting ambition. It wastes the value of
lost time and expense through sickness, and
the maintenance of prisons, police courts,
homes, and asylums due to drink. Drink is,
in fact, one of the most destructive evils,
destroying mind and body, which curses the
human race.

B

IS

Chapter II.

The Temperance Movement.

The origin of the beer drinking customs of
the British people is lost in antiquity. Pytheus,
the Greek navigator, who visited Britain
330 B.C., tells in his journal that the inhabi-
tants of these islands drank, instead of wine,
a fermented liquor made from barley, which
they called " curmi."

" In the latter part of the fifteenth century
English beer had gained a reputation on the
continent and was much exported from
England to Flanders. Wherever brewed, it
was the favourite beverage of the people, who
drank it without stint. ' Barley,' says a
physician of this period, ' is the Englishman's
vine.' It was a complaint heard more than once
that more corn was malted than was eaten
for food ; for the English, like the other
nations of northern Europe, were known as
great drunkards."*

In the eighteenth century drunkenness
among the upper classes of English Society
was universal. The reading of the literature

* Denton's England in the Fifteenth Century, p. 204.

19
of that time leaves one in wonder at the
amazing drinking capabilities of the wellr
known people of that period. Nor was this
drinking apparently considered at all
reprehensible, but rather an accomplishment
for admiration. Addison, Steele, Goldsmith,
Parnell, Churchill, were all notoriously
drunken, and Lord Bolingbroke, when in
office, sat up whole nights drinking, and in
the morning, would bind a wet napkin round
his forehead and hasten away to his office.
In the latter part of the eighteenth century
English Society was soaked in drink, the
heir-apparent leading the pace. Among the
men of this period, Brinsley Sheridan, William
Pitt, Lord Chancellor Eldon, Lord Stowell,
and Professor Porson, could each empty the
contents of six bottles at a sitting, and re-
peatedly did so ! Sir Gilbert Elliott, writing
in 1787 expresses his inability to conceive
how the men of business and the great orators
of the House of Commons continued to re-
concile their inordinate consumption of liquor
with their Parliamentary duties.

The drunkenness of the upper classes — of
royalty, aristocracy, and clergy — set the
example to the masses. All the vices of the
poor — even to their Toryism — have come
down to them from the classes above. It was
in the Reign of George I. that the habit of
gin drinking took root, and " small as is the
place which the fact occupies in English

20

history, it was probably, if we considered all
the consequences which have flowed from it,
the most momentous event of the eighteenth
century — incomparably more so than any
event in the purely political or military annals
of the country."* The masses of those days
put as much enthusiasm into following
the example of the upper classes as their
descendants of to-day give to the aristocratic
vices of gambling and immorality Distil-
leries increased in number and taverns were
opened everywhere to satisfy and encourage
this new popular demand.

When the Industrial Revolution came at
the end of that century the masses were
helpless before it. They were ignorant,
without political power, and without under-
standing of the meaning of the great economic
changes going on. They xvete easy victims
of the free play of competition under which
the robust, clear headed men of the age worked
the new possibilities of wealth production for
their own individual gain. Inhuman con-
ditions of labour, the destruction of the home
industries, the driving of the people into the
towns, the employment of children and
women in the mines and factories, the break-
ing up of the home, the degradation of the
standard of the working class life by the
sweeping away of the labour protection
statutes, the crushing taxation of the poor,

* Lecky History of England in the iSth Century, p. 479.

21

the general ignorance of sanitary laws, the
absence of any real municipal government,
the general state of industrial and social chaos
from which only a few found it possible to
emerge successfully were pre-eminently a state
of things calculated to feed the existing
appetite for drink. The masses of the people
in the industrial towns, physically enervated
by their working and social conditions, turned
more and more to drink as the only means
within their knowledge of drowning their
misery.

It is significant of some connection between
the increase of drunkenness, or the recognition
of the social evil of drunkenness, and the
industrial condition of the people, that it was
not until one generation had come under the in-
fluence of the factory system that the drink
question came to be considered so serious as
to demand organised effort to combat its
ravages. The first Temperance Society was
formed in England in 1830, and since then
there has been a sustained and widespread
temperance work carried on in this country,
which for the enthusiasm and devotion of
those who have taken part in it has scarcely
been equalled, and never surpassed, by any
reform movement of the nineteenth century.

The growth of temperance sentiment since
1830 has been remarkable. When the work-
ing men of Preston started their Teetotal
Society they had no support from clergy,

22

ministers, or doctors. In 1837 there were but
100 abstinent ministers of religion ; there was
no ecclesiastical dignitary favourable to the
movement. There were but half-a-dozen
known medical men who were abstainers, and
every member of Parliament was a non-
teetotaller. To-day there are 2,213 branches of
the Church of England Temperance Society/
and two Archbishops, sixteen home and more
colonial Bishops, and lesser dignitaries by the
score are professed abstainers. The Noncon-
formist ministers are, to a great extent, not
only personally abstainers, but are active in
temperance work. There is a British Medical
Temperance Association, including a number
of University professors; and recently 14,718
medical men presented a petition to the
Government of the day praying for temperance
teaching in the schools. The Army and the
Navy have their Temperance Societies, with
which many thousands of men are associated.
The House of Commons has come under the
influence of the extending temperance senti-
ment, and, to the old members of the House, the
present Parliament's most remarkable feature
is the large number of abstaining members
and the temperance of the general body. Of
the men elected on the 9th November, 1907,
to occupy the honoured position of Mayor no
less than 64 are proud to be known as total
abstainers, and the abstaining Provosts of
Scottish burghs number 46. The temperance

23
bodies calculate that there are 3,000,000 adult
persons in the country who are abstainers, and
in the juvenile Bands of Hope, of which there
are 22,000 societies, there are 3,000,000 chil-
dren enrolled.

These figures of the extent to which tem-
perance sentiment and abstinence from drink
prevail amongst all classes in the community
are striking evidence of the public recogni-
tion of the drink evil, and of the need for
counteracting its ravages by personal example
and associated effort. Instead of the teeto-
taller being an object for pity or contempt, as
was the case seventy years ago, the prevail-
ing public sentiment is one of condemnation
of drunkenness and respect for the total
abstainer.

24

Chapter III.
Labour Organisations and Drink.

The progress of the Temperance sentiment
described in the previous chapter has not been
confined to the upper and middle classes. The
temperance movement began among the
workers. It seems to be the law for vice to
descend from the so-called " upper " classes
to the so-called " lower," and for virtue to
begin among the masses and gradually to ascend
to the " classes." There were in the dark
days of the early nineteenth century many of
the working classes who struggled bravely
against the oppressive conditions of their
industrial lot. The records of the political
agitations of those days, of the beginnings of
modern trade unionism and the co-operative
and friendly societies, tell how a minority of
the poor fought against adversity and suc-
ceeded in preventing themselves from being
completely debased by the conditions which
the majority of their class found too strong
to overcome.

The history of the Labour movement in the
nineteenth century shows a growing perception
by the leaders of the working class emancipa-

25

tion — the trade unions and the co-operators —
of the causes of the people's poverty and of
the obstacles hindering the advancement and
unity of the workers. At the time when
drinking, and even drunkenness were not con-
sidered reprehensible, it could not be expected
that Labour organisations would be un-
influenced by popular custom. The records
of the older trade unions give some interesting
references to the drinking which was associated
with the trade union meetings. Their lodge
meetings were almost invariably held in public
houses. Drinking was associated with all
the functions and ceremonials of the union
meetings. It was the custom of the block
printers of Glasgow to exact a fee of seven
guineas for each new apprentice, and this
money was always straightway drunk by the
men of the print field, the employer taking
the head of the table, no work being done by
any one until the fund was exhausted.*

The same writers say : — f

In the reports and financial statements of the
Unions for the first half of the century, drink was one
of the largest items of expenditure, express provision
being made by the rules for the refreshment of the
officers and members at all meetings. The rules of
the London Society of Woolstaplers (1813) state that
the president shall be accommodated with his own
choice of liquors, wine only excepted. . . . The
Friendly Society of Ironmoulders (1809) ordains that
the Marshall shall distribute the beer round the

* Webb's History of Trade Unionism, p. 66.
t Ibid p. 67 and pp. 185-6.

26

meeting impartially, members being forbidden to
drink out of turn except the officers at the table or
a member on his first coming to town. Even as late as
1837 the rules of the Steam Engine Makers' Society
direct one third of the weekly contribution to be spent
in the refreshment of members, a provision which
drops out in 1846. In that year the delegate meet-
ing of the Ironmoulders prohibited drinking and
smoking at its meetings, and followed up this self-
denying ordinance by altering the rules of the Society
so as to change the allowance of beer at branch meet-
ing to its equivalent in money. ' We believe,' they
declared, ' the business of the Society would be much
better done were there no liquor allowance.* . . . By
i860 most of the larger Societies had abolished all
allowance for liquor, and some have even prohibited
its consumption during business meetings. It is to
be remembered that the Unions had, at first, no other
meeting place than the club room, freely placed at
their disposal by the publican, and that their payment
for drink was of the nature of rqnt. Meanwhile the
Compositors and Bookbinders were removing their
headquarters from public-houses to offices of their
own, and the Steam Engine Makers were allowing
branches to hire rooms for meetings, so as to avoid
temptation. In 1850 the Ironmoulders report that
some publicans were refusing to lend rooms for meet-
ings, owing to the growth of Temperance.

The last words of the foregoing sentence
are significant. They indicate the spread of
temperance principles, which had been a
feature of the whole trade union move-
ment for some few years previous to that date

(1850).

The Co-operative movement began at a
later period than trade unionism, and in its
inception and early stages it benefited from

27

the growing popular sentiment against in-
temperance, which had been affecting the
more active of the working classes. The
Rochdale Pioneers, who were Owenites,
Chartists and teetotallers, put forward as one
of their objects, that for " the promotion of
sobriety, a temperance hotel should be opened
as soon as convenient/ ' The Co-operative
movement has kept itself free from association
with liquor, and this is all the more indicative
of a strong belief in the ruinous character of
drunkenness, when it is remembered how the
sale of drink would have added to the dividends
of the non-drinking membership.

The growth of temperance sentiment in the
working class movements continued, and
within the last few years the Labour move-
ment has taken an increasingly aggressive
attitude against the drink traffic. As far back
as 1893, nearly 200 Labour leaders, comprising
all the most prominent trade unionists of that
day, replied in a public manifesto to the charge
that licensing legislation would interfere with
the liberties of the working classes. Speaking
of the Bill introduced in that year to establish
the principle of " popular control/' they said
that the opponents of that measure " profess
to be intensely interested in the protection of
the liberties of the working classes. It is a
fraudulent profession. The liberty which most
of them really desire to maintain is the liberty
of privileged monopolists to exploit the work-

28

ing classes, and to draw and suck from them
their money by indirect means. ' Liberty of
the people ! ' Could any cry be more absurd ?
. . . As at least six-sevenths of all entitled
to vote belong to what are called ' the poorer
classes/ it is sheer mockery and insult of the
monopolists to tell them that the measure
will enable the rich to tyrannise over them."
Trade Union officials have seen so much of
the evils of drunkenness among the workers ;
they have seen how drink so often frustrates
their efforts to gain improvements ; they have
seen how important it is that the leaders of
the working men should have clear heads, and
should set an example in sobriety and self-
restraint, that the men appointed to the
secretaryships of the great unions, within
recent years, are almost without exception
total abstainers. Every man who has occupied
the chair of the Trade Union Congress for the
last six years has been a total abstainer. Of
the 30 Labour and Socialist members returned
to Parliament at the election of 1906, the
majority are total abstainers.

When the Trade Union Congress met at
Leeds in 1904, there was formed a " Trade
Union and Labour Officials' Temperance
Fellowship." In the three years of its existence
this body has done good work in seeking to
obtain facilities for the meetings of trade
union lodges away from public houses. The
Right Hon. Thomas Burt, speaking at one of

29

the meetings of this Fellowship said that
when he became secretary of the Northumber-
land Miners' Association, forty-one years ago,
nearly all the lodges of the union met in public
houses, and although they had quadrupled the
number of their branches, not a single lodge
meeting was now held on licensed premises.
Mr. A. H. Gill, M.P., the Secretary of the
Bolton Cotton Spinners, at a meeting of the
Fellowship held during the Congress at Bath,
in 1907, made the even more remarkable
statement that in his own society five years
ago he believed every branch meeting was
held at a public house, while now 30 per cent,
of the meetings were held in places where no
drink was sold.

" I have known the time " said Mr. W. C.
Steadman, M.P., the Secretary to the Trade
Union Congress " when a resolution dealing
with the Temperance Question was ruled out
of order and cut off the Conference Agenda."
Times have changed in Trade Unionism since
then. At the Congress of 1906 a resolution
was passed instructing the Committee to en-
deavour to get from the Local Government
Board facilities for Trade Union Meetings
being held in the local Municipal rooms. The
Labour Party, to which 1,000,000 Trade
Unionists are affiliated, has on several occasions
passed strong resolutions upon the Temperance
Question.

At the London Conference in 1906 a resolu-

3<>
tion in the following terms was carried by
600,000 votes for, to 103,000 against.

It being admitted by judges, magistrates, chief
constables, poor law administrators, governors of
gaols and lunatic asylums, ministers of religion of all
denominations, and social workers generally, that the
liquor traffic is a fruitful source of poverty, crime
and lunacy, this conference is of opinion that the time
has arrived when the workers of the nation should
demand that a law be enacted giving the inhabitants
of every locality the right to veto any application for
either the renewal of existing licenses, or the granting
of new ones, seeing that the public-houses are generally
situated in thickly-populated working-class districts.

Twelve months later the Conference at
Belfast showed a further advance of opinion.
The Chairman of the Congress (Mr. J. J.
Stephenson, A.S.E.), in his Presidential Address
said :—

There is the Temperance question to settle. The
Labour movement had every sympathy with legitimate
Temperance reform. We expect no mercy from the
brewers and the publicans, and we have no alliance
with them. A sober nation is the best nation to solve
its political problems.

At a later stage of the Conference a resolu-
tion in the following terms was carried with-
out a division and with acclamation.

That any measure of Temperance reform should
confer upon localities full and unfettered power for
dealing with the licensing question in accordance
with local opinion. By this means localities should
be enabled to —

(a) Prohibit the sale of liquor within their boun-
daries ;

(b) Reduce the number of licenses and regulate the
conditions under which they may be held ; and

31
(c) If a locality decides that licenses are to be granted,
to determine whether such licenses shall be
under private or any form of public control.

In the course of the debate upon this resolu-
tion Mr. J as. Sexton, the General Secretary of
the Dock Labourers' Union said, " There was
nothing hampered the Labour Party more
than the accursed drink. It was responsible
for more degradation and ignorance than all
the other enemies of the movement put to-
gether."

The charge is often made against the
Socialists that they ignore the importance of
the Drink Curse, and relegate it to a mere
trivial issue of the capitalistic system. The
Independent Labour Party, which is the
chief Socialist body in Britain, contains
among its membership a larger proportion of
abstainers than any other political organisa-
tion in the country. Drink is sold in less
than three per cent, of its clubs, and the Annual
Conferences of the Party have passed resolu-
tions deploring the association of drink even
to this extent with the movement. The party
has its Temperance programme, and the sub-
ject of the legislative aspect of the question
is frequently treated at its public meetings
and debates.

The continental Socialists are alive to the
hindrance which drink is to the progress of
Socialist ideas. For years the great leaders
of Belgian, Swiss, and Austrian Socialism —

32

M, Vandervelde, Dr. Otto Lang, and Dr.
Vktor Adler have been energetic Temperance
advocates, the first-named delivering a power-
ful appeal for Temperance from the Socialist
standpoint at the Seventh International Con-
gress against Alcoholism at Paris. In 1903
the Congress of the Austrian Socialist Party
passed a resolution against alcoholism, and
similar resolutions have been passed by Con-
gresses of the Belgian, Scandinavian, Swiss
and German Socialists. The German trade
unions have repeatedly passed resolutions
against drinking. The following is the text
of the resolution on drinking passed at the
German Socialist Congress at Essen in Sep-
tember, 1907.*

There is a rapidly growing sentiment against
alcohol among the continental Socialists.
The young men who are coming into the
movement are mainly abstainers. This is
due largely to the example of the leaders
who lay great and constant stress upon the fact
that the workers need all their powers in the
fight for Socialism, and point out that alcohol
diminishes the fighting power of the work-
man, which is in the brain, for alcohol is a
brain poison. There are Socialist Temper-
ance Societies in Sweden, Germany, Austria
and Belgium. Selling of alcohol in Socialist
clubs is prohibited by resolution of the Con-

* The full text ef the resolution, and of the Austrian
resolution also is printed in Appendix I.

33
gress, and this prohibition is generally recog-
nised. The famous Maison du Peuple at
Brussels sells tea, coffee, beer, wine, but no
spirits. At the Workers' Congress at Brussels
in 1907, an anti-alcohol resolution was passed,
and a Bureau was instructed to gather informa-
tion from the various countries as to the
ravages of Drink, and this information was
to be disseminated among the Socialists of the
several nations.

The first step to reform is an awakened
conscience as to the need of reform. The next
is an understanding of the nature of the problem
to be treated. The facts given in this and
the preceding chapter furnish evidence of
the awakening of the public conscience and
of the Labour andcSocialist movement to the
need of dealing with the curse of intemperance.

34

Chapter IV.

Who Consumes the Drink?

In his letter to the Times on National
Expenditure on Drink for 1906 Dr. Dawson
Burns says, " There is a greatly increasing
number who seldom use any intoxicating
liquor." These remarks are embodied in a
statement that in the year 1906 the sum of
£166,425,911 was spent on drink by some of
the people of the United Kingdom. This
represents an expenditure per head of the
population of £3 16s. 3d. The corresponding
figure for the year 1842 was £2 8s. 5f d. These
figures apparently contradict the assumption
that temperance has made great progress
during the past sixty years. Contrasting the
expenditure for 1906 with that of 1886 and 1896
we find. Expenditure upon drink per head
of the population : —

1886 £3 6 10

1896 £3 15 6

19 06 £3 16 3

Neither do these figures carry on their faces
a confirmation of the claim that a " greatly

35
increasing number seldom use any alcoholic
liquor." But the facts set forth in the two
preceding chapters and the statement of Dr.
Dawson Burns are undoubtedly true notwith-
standing. There arises, therefore, the difficult
task of reconciling temperance progress and
an increased expenditure upon liquor.

In each of the years 1900-1905 the drink
bill showed a successive reduction amounting
in the aggregate to £21,759,286, or taking the
increase of population into account, a reduc-
tion of £33,844>554-

The decline was arrested in 1906, but to
such a small extent as not to warrant any
conclusions therefrom. It is doubtful if we
should be justified in concluding from the
figures 1900-1905 that a decline had set in
which was going to continue. A glance at
the Drink Bill for each of the years since 1837
makes one hesitate to come to such a con-
clusion, even from the satisfactory figures of
the six years, 1900-1905. The eight years,
1879-1888, were years of rapid decrease in
the Drink Bill, which brought down the ex-
penditure per head from £4 4s. id. in 1877, to
£3 6s. 8d. in 1888.

The explanation of the apparent contra-
dictions of more teetotallers and very moderate
drinkers against an expenditure which is larger
per head than sixty years ago is we think to
some extent set forth by Mr. (now Sir) T. P*
Whittaker, in his Economic Aspect of th&

36
Drink Problem (p. 17) : —

In my opinion the true explanation of what is con-
sidered to be the greater sobriety of the people is to
be found in another direction. There is more drink-
ing now than there was sixty of eighty years ago.
But it is of a different kind. It is more frequent and
regular. There is less obvious intoxication, but there
is more soaking. There is less reeling drunkenness,
less evident excess, and, consequently, there are fewer
cases in the police courts, and fewer guests under the
dinner table. But, taking the year round, more liquor
is swallowed. There have been great changes in
manners and customs in this respect during the last
hundred years, but they have not affected for the better
the quantity consumed. Habitual drinking, continual
and frequent, has taken the place of occasional bouts
of brutal drunkenness.

It is true, we believe, that drinking by
those who do take liquor, is more frequent
and regular, and this is the outcome of the
changed conditions of employment. The
discipline of the factory and workshop, a
discipline which is every year getting more
strict, tends to compel greater sobriety among
the factory and workshop hands during work-
ing hours. The practice of " breaking time,"
of keeping "St. Monday," has greatly
diminished during the last twenty-five years as
every employer of labour will bear testimony.*
The conditions of present-day machine-using
industries insist upon attendance during the
fixed hours of work. Where work is not done
on the premises of the employer, or where the
workman can by the nature of his occupation

* For further testimony on this point see Appendix II.

37
to some extent regulate his hours, there is
more opportunity for frequent libations. We
believe that while drinking has declined
among those who are under the discipline of
the well organised industries., there has been
a corresponding increase in the expenditure
upon drink among the working and commercial-
classes who have a freer disposal of their
working hours. In support of this theory we
may quote some figures which show how
largely in recent years that class has grown-
which has command of its own time and to
which the temptations of drinking are open
every hour of the day.

In proportion to the population the number
of persons employed in factories and workshops
has been getting less for the past forty years.
Indeed, in the trades where machinery is most
extensively employed in production, the
number of workers is actually less than was
the case fifty years ago. The following figures,
based on the census reports, are interesting :

Persons occupied,

including Employees

and Dealers.

Total Population.

1S51

1 901

1851

1 901

Textile
Tailoring,
Boot & Shoe

1,671,681
504,072

I.30I.685
559.409

27*745.949

41,454,758

There has been a large increase in the
number of persons employed in certain other
occupations where the conditions of employ-

38
ment demand unbroken attendance during
working hours, namely, in the engineering
and shipbuilding trades, the railways, tram-
ways and mining. The building trade shows
an increase of over fifty per cent, in the last
fifty years, though this trade is not to anything
like the same extent under the strict discipline
as to regularity of attendance as are the factory
and workshop trades. But taking those
occupations which may be considered as
coming within the category of the directly
disciplined trades, we get approximately the
following increases in the employees in the last

fifty years : —

Persons Employed.

In 1851. In 1891.

Mining, etc. .. .. 620,000 .. 906,541

Engineering, etc. .. 1,000,000 .. 1,435,835

Domestic Service .. 500,000 .. 1,641,154

Railways, Tramways, &c. 400,000 . . 450,000

2,520,000 .. 4,435.530
If we add to this number the textile and
boot and shoe trades, and the lesser factory
and workshop industries, we may safely con-
clude that 8,000,000, out of 14,000,000 occupied
persons in the United Kingdom are working
under the strict discipline of industrial direc-
tion, and have no opportunities for drinking
during working hours, and are liable to
dismissal for absenting themselves from work
to drink.

Of the industrial population this is the sec-
tion which probably is most temperate. It is

39

when we consider the nature of the employ-
ment of the remaining 6,000,000 that we find
at least some plausible explanation of the
apparent contradiction between increased
general sobriety and an increased expenditure
on drink.

The number of persons employed in what
are called in the North of England " the
loose-end " occupations is increasing beyond
the increase of any other class. Since 1861
the total number of occupied persons has
increased by 53 per cent., while the number of
the " commercial " class has risen in the period
by 150 per cent. ! Between 1891 and 1900
the number of persons supposed to be earning
a living as merchants, brokers, agents, factors,
dealers, salesmen, buyers, commercial travel-
lers, and othi^r " loose-end " occupations, ap-
proximately increased 50 per cent. We have
mentioned already the great increase in the
number returned as belonging to the building
trade, and there are other manual labour
occupations where the discipline is easy, which
show considerable increases also. We will
now summarise* the numbers of the class
with which we are now dealing : —
Commercial . . . . . . . . . . 2,000,000

Carmen and Waggoners and other Road

Workers . . . . . . . . . . 500,000

Building Trades .. .. .. .. 1,000,000

Agriculture . . . . . . . . . . 2,000,000

General Labourers . . . . . . . . 700,000

6,200,000

40
Taking out of this list the agricultural
workers, we see that all the rest have occupa-
tions which bring them into constant contact
with the temptations of the public-house and
the social drinking customs which are respon-
sible for so much senseless drinking. The
nature of the occupations will not permit of
protracted drinking, but, in the place of that,
the practice is frequent single drinks, with the
result that there is little gross intoxication,
because the drinks do not follow each other
in sufficiently rapid succession.

There is greater sobriety, there is less drink
consumed among the factory and workshop
population, and the total expenditure on drink
is maintained by the classes with leisure, or
who have constant opportunities and tempta-
tions to drink. The section whose occupations
fall under the description of "commercial"
probably consume more liquor per head than
any other section of the community.

The theory we have been endeavouring to
establish is supported by the experience of the
last few years. These have been years of
great prosperity in the textile, iron, and coal
trades. But there has been no increase in the
consumption of drink. This fact, we submit,
is a strong confirmation of the theory that the
bulk of the expenditure on drink is made by
the other sections to whom we have attri-
buted it. Further confirmation is given by
the statements in a letter from an excise

41

supervisor at Leeds, which was read to the
House of Commons by the Chancellor of the
Exchequer on April 15th, 1905. Speaking of
the way in which the factory and workshop
people spend their Bank Holiday, he said : —
Instead of spending their wages in public-houses
they take advantage of cheap excursions. ... To
verify certain statements I visited several licensed
houses on August Bank Holiday and found them all
practically empty. On visiting the railway station I
noticed every excursion train was packed. Similar
reports reach me from other places.

If the theory we have tried to establish is
sound, it will have an important bearing upon
proposals of temperance reform.

There is one other painful explanation
which is put forward to account in some
measure for the sustained expenditure upon
drink, namely, the increase of drinking among
women. It seems to be universally accepted
as a fact that such is the case. Statistics
certainly appear to support the statement.

DEATH RATES FROM INTEMPERANCE (CHRONIC ALCOHOL-
ISM AND DELIRIUM TREMENS) PER MILLION LIVING.

1876-81 1881-85 1886-9O 189I-95 1896-99

Males .... 60 66 74 86 100

Females ..24 31 40 50 60

In twenty-three years there has been an
increase of 150 per cent, for females.

In 1907 a White Paper was presented to
Parliament giving information obtained from
certain police forces as to the Frequenting of
Public Houses by Women and Children. The

42

report gives some appalling facts. We append
a summary of the returns.

Place-

I

■-■

1

a

Number of

Women and

Children

entering.

Ags ok Children .

I

3

C
I

I

Birmingha.ru ..
Bristol

472

16

H

—

2949
2441

Nearly all under six, re-
mainder under eleven •
1849 undtr 5^

Liverpool

9

s

7800

3ifi

75 In arms, rest under a .

London

23

4

39541

10746

1 164 In arms rest under 16

Manchester . .

*4

12

—

8973

6471 under 5,

Sheffield

6

14

I054

irSi

All under 6.

The causes of the increased drinking among
women are somewhat obscure. The sale of
drink by grocers is frequently ascribed as a
reason. We would suggest that the tendencies
of modern industry have some bearing upon
the matter. The number of women who have
to struggle against men in the labour market
for a living is rapidly growing. In 1901 there
were nearly three millions of women and
girls working in industrial occupations other
than domestic service. In so far as industrial
conditions are responsible for drinking among
men, it will follow that when women are
subjected to the same influences and tempta-
tions they are likely to do the same. Super-
stitions linger longer among women, and the

43
value of alcohol as a restorative, which
formerly was so generally believed, is still
widespread among them. Women, from physio-
logical causes, are mor subject to nervous
diseases, an I when th:ir conditions of life
are unhealthy, and the temptations of drink
are before them, there is the probability they
may succumb to the temptation.

44

Chapter V*
The Causes of Drinking.

To diagnose accurately a case is more
difficult than to know how to treat it success-
fully. Similar symptoms may arise from a
variety of causes, and the same cause may
give rise to a variety of symptoms. The
elaborate and intricate interplay of causes
and of cause and effect has also to be con-
sidered. In social questions especially, there
is an intimate connection all round, and in no
one instance can treatment be successfully
applied without regard to the relation of the
particular case to other industrial and social
conditions.

Since the Temperance movement began
there has been wonderful progress made in
what we may call the scientific method of
treating social questions. The empirical and
revolutionary ways of treating effects have
been superseded by the diagnostic and
evolutionary methods. Seventy years of added
experience of the working of the capitalist
system have taught us much of its character,
its tendencies, and its effects. The discovery

45
of the law of evolution has modified former*
ideas, and the experience of attempts to stamp
out one evil only to find another rising in its
place has taught us that the hydra-headed
monster we call the Social Problem is not to
be destroyed by cutting off its heads one by
one.

The ideals held, in the early days of the
Temperance agitation both of the character
of the drink evil and of the treatment of it, are
well expressed in the objects of the United
Kingdom Alliance, namely, " total abstinence
for the individual and prohibition for the State."
The simplicity of this method of abolishing
drunkenness and drink was due to the belief
that the only cause of drinking was the ex-
istence of the facilities to drink. It indicates a
faith in the power of the individual to resist
the influence of drink, or failing that, it demands
the removal of the temptation, when apparently
the desire for drink will disappear. If the
problem were so simple as that we should be
much nearer the teetotal millennium than
we are to-day.

The advantages and benefits of personal
abstinence are so obvious that if there were
not some strong reason why people drink,
one would think that abstinence " for the
individual " would be the universal rule. It is
not enough to offer the common excuse that
people drink "because they like it." This
only gets us to the further question, "Why do

4 6
people like drink?" The liking for drink is
not a natural one, but an acquired one.
Once begun, the practice of taking alcohol is
continued in moderation under the belief that
it warms, comforts, refreshes and benefits.
Like all drugs, it creates an appetite for itself ;
the habit of drinking becomes confirmed ; it
becomes master of the man. Men " like it "
because it gives the pleasure of satisfaction —
but not of a natural but an artificial desire.

So long as the people live unnatural lives,
they will have unnatural cravings — excessive
tea drinking, the taste for highly seasoned foods,
gambling, love of sensationalism, all arise
from the same causes as the desire and liking
for alcohol. It is because they are causes of
drinking apart from the presence of the public
house that the appeal for total abstinence for
the individual has not obtained greater response.
So long as this craving for exhilaration and
[ restoratives exists, it will find some other way
of satisfaction if it cannot be gratified by
alcohol.

It is because there are causes of the
drink appetite which have rendered the appeal
to the individual so often ineffective, and this
is also responsible for the failure to realise the
second part of the Alliance's object.
Prohibition by the State must depend upon
the will of the people in a democratic country,
and it cannot be expected that the persons
who refuse to apply prohibition in their

47
individual capacity will be willing as citizens
to impose it upon themselves and all others.

We must get deeper than the mere presence
of the public house to find the causes of drink-
ing. The influences which drive men to
drink are many and varied. When Socialist
propaganda first boldly attacked the position
of the orthodox teetotallers, and, if the whole
truth must be told, somewhat rudely and
without qualification, reversed the theory
of the cause of poverty by denying that
poverty was caused by drinking and asserting
that poverty was the cause of drinking, the
temperance party, being human after all and
therefore liable to intemperance — with equal
audacity maintained that poverty had nothing
at all to do with causing drunkenness. But
time has brought both parties to recognise
that there is a sufficient foundation of truth
in each contention to excuse each party
having, without full investigation, raised its
contention to the dignity of an explanatory
theory.

So long as the Temperance Party and
Socialists were in direct conflict, each refusing
to concede anything of the other's contention,
there was a regrettable weakening of effort
both for temperance and social reform work.
The Socialist looked upon Temperance work
as useless, as a mere cutting of the weeds or
covering of the sores. " Capitalism, not
drink, is the enemy. It is no use trying to

48

make men sober. It cannot be done so long
as wage slavery exists. If it could, it would
but make men more profitable machines for
exploitation. We may lessen drinking by
bettering the conditions of labour and life,
but direct temperance reform is useless and
wasted effort." When the Socialist attitude
to the drink question was stated in such a
repulsive way as that and when so much time
was spent by Socialists in demonstrating that
total abstinence would tend to lower wages,
and generally in a way which left the impression
that men should drink to keep up wages, it is
no wonder that the men who knew the awful
daily devastation wrought by the drink traffic
refused to concede that anything could be
more important than abolishing this evil.

Each party has now modified its attitude,
and each recognises the essential claim of the
other's position, namely, that while there is an
intimate connection between poverty and
drink, and that while poverty causes drinking,
drinking aggravates poverty and in many
individual cases is the cause of it.

But much of the criticism to which the
Socialist contention that poverty is the main
cause of drinking is subjected shows an
ignorance of what Socialists mean by poverty
in this connection. Even the Right Hon.
John Burns, whose former intimate acquaint-
ance with Socialist phraseology ought to have
saved him from committing the error, puts

49
upon the word the very narrowest construc-
tion. In his Raper-Lees lecture, Labour
and Drink* he spends a considerable time
in endeavouring to shake the theory that
poverty causes drinking. He points to instances
where a rise of wages has been followed by
increased drunkenness and more criminal dis-
order, and to cases where wages are low and
sobriety general. But if the right hon. gentle-
man had taken the trouble to understand the
theory he endeavoured to disprove he would
have spared himself much labour in collecting
extracts, and would have saved himself from
the humiliation of attempting, but signally fail-
ing, to disprove a theory which he immediately
afterwards accepted and made the basis of
his proposals of temperance reform.

No Socialist limits the meaning of the word
poverty to the amount of wages a person
receives. By poverty is meant low wages in
so far as they are inadequate to provide for
the satisfaction of healthy wants, but included
in the meaning of the word are the conditions
under which the wage is earned — long
hours, insanitary conditions, exhausting and
mechanical toil — bad housing, bad food, bad
cooking, lack of home comforts — often
through the wife working — lack of education,
an inability to take an interest in elevating
things or healthy pastimes, the worry and

* Pages 12, 13, and 14.
D

So
uncertainty and struggle of present day life.
By poverty as a factor in the drink question
Socialists mean the results of commercialism
and competition upon the lives of the people.

The statistics and facts given in the lecture
by Mr. John Burns, for the purpose of proving
that poverty does not cause drinking, prove
the very opposite with overwhelming force.
The figures are given as to the arrests for
drunkenness in Liverpool in each day of the
week, and . the particulars as to the occupa-
tions of the persons arrested. Quite naturally
the busiest time for policemen is the week-end,
and, as one would expect, 1,905 out of 2,694
cases of drunkenness are labourers, sailors,
firemen, and carters. Three-quarters of the
persons arrested belong to the very poorest,
hardest-worked and worst treated classes of
the community. Why should this class,
though small in proportion to the total popu-
lation of the city furnish three-quarters of the
cases of drunkenness ? The right hon. gentle-
man says " these facts go to prove that
possession of means causes drunkenness." If
the possession of " means " is responsible for
driving the labourer to drink, why does not
the possession of larger means drive other
classes to drink in equal proportions ? The
lecturer himself supplies the answer and at
the same time demolishes his own contention.
" Surely this proves," he says, " that the people
perish for lack of knowledge, absence of self-

5*
respect, lowness of aim, the fewness of their
wants, the sordid level of their appetites. "
And this is what Socialists mean by poverty.

To reply to the contention that poverty
causes drinking, by pointing to instances
where men with high wages drink, and to
others where men with low wages are sober,
is no valid answer. It is not so much the
money amount of the wages as the conditions
under which the wage is earned and the out-
side opportunities and associations of the
individual. If a man or a class " lack know-
ledge, self-respect and loftiness of aim," the
higher the wages of their labour, the more
they will spend in satisfying their " sordid
appetites." It is precisely what one would
expect, that times of good trade and higher
wages are characterised by an increased ex-
penditure upon drink. The higher wages
have come, but the wisdom to spend them
wisely has lingered, and the increase of wages
is too often spent in ways which injure rather
than bless. The cause is poverty — poverty
of knowledge.

It should be remembered, too, that the
higher wages earned under good trade are- ,
obtained at the cost of greater effort, and the
working hours are often longer and the
intensity of the strain greater* This leads to
greater physical exhaustion, and to drink for
stimulation. The cause is poverty — poverty
of leisure, poverty of knowledge.

52
Opposites often produce similar results.
Too much work brings physical exhaustion,
and weakens the moral strength, produces,
in short, a state where the individual falls an
easy prey to temptations to drink. Too little
work encourages laziness, weakens the
moral force, and produces a similar condition
to that just described. Nothing is more
speedily destructive of effort to rise superior
to one's condition than the apparent hope-
lessness of success. The instability and
irregularity of employment in these days,
which affect more or less the whole of our
wage-earning population, are responsible for
the loss of much of the self-respect and lack
of ambition which characterise so many of
the masses. Nine-tenths of the wage-earning
population are working on engagements
which may be terminated at a week's, a day's,
an hour's notice. The average working man
has in grim fact " no abiding city here."

The influences which under the general term
of poverty we have described as tending to
cause drinking, are by no means confined in
their operation to the wage-earning class.
Every section of the community, from the
richest to the poorest, are influenced in their
lives, characters, tastes, vices, and indulgences
by the spirit of the age. Very often it is
pointed out, as a score against the contention
that poverty causes drink, that the middle-
classes and the rich also drink, though they

53
are not poor. There never was an age in
which riches were the associate of poverty to
the extent to which they are in our own.
" The bankrupt century " Carlyle called the
nineteenth century. Yes, bankrupt in idealism,
in morality, in its valuation of human life,
and in conception of everything which makes
a nation great. " The great cry which rises
from all our manufacturing cities, louder than
their furnace blast, is in very deed for this, —
that we manufacture everything there except
men ; we blanch cotton, and strengthen steel,
and refine sugar, and shape pottery ; but to
brighten, strengthen, to refine, or to form
a single living spirit, never enters into our
estimate of advantages/'* In this sordid age
of materialism when not alone do the
labourer, the fireman, the sailor, and the
carter lack a lofty ideal, poverty curses the
rich equally as it destroys the poor.

The anxiety and worry of business, its in-
creasingly speculative and risky character,
the hurry and anxiety to get rich, are un-
nerving our commercial classes and driving
them to drink and suicide. The rich upper
classes are as enervated and demoralised by
idleness and luxury as are the middle classes
by worry and hurry and the workers by the
conditions of their existence. The influences
which are responsible for drinking among
the upper and middle classes arise from the

* Ruskin : Nature of Gothic, p. 15.

54
same root causes as the influences which
encourage the masses to drink.

It is scarcely necessary to qualify the fore-
going statements by mentioning that not all
the individuals who compose the respective
classes fall under the influences which others
do not or cannot resist. It is perfectly true
that very many men of all classes, business
men with heavy responsibilities, and workmen
who toil .hard and long for small wages do not
fall victims to drink. Every man's environ-
ment is a combination of innumerable in-
fluences — some degrading, some exalting. Every
man varies in the strength of his power to
resist and to select. An open sewer is a
possible source of infection to a whole village,
but only a few fall victims to smallpox or
typhoid. A disease attacks and overcomes
those who are constitutionally most suscep-
tible. So with the drink craving. In the
conditions of modern life, drink is a danger
to everybody, but it is a blessed thing that
there are counter influences which in so many
cases save men from its allurements.

55

Chapter VI.

Social Conditions and Drinking.

The Socialist contention that industrial and
social conditions have much to do with the
drinking habits of the people is now very
generally accepted. Medical men, Royal
Commissioners, social workers, housing re-
formers, educationalists, labour leaders— -all
admit that drink and poverty, in the wide
sense of the word, are intimately associated.

The Right Hon. John Burns,* after expend-
ing much effort to deny the connection
between poverty and drink, indicts a number
of industrial occupations as " liquor-cursed
trades." " All dusty, dirty, disagreeable occu-
pations that are carried on in hot places," he
says, " predispose to drink. . . . Can you
wonder at them flying to drink ? Let the
Rev. R. J. Campbell, or the Archbishop of
Canterbury," he continues, " work in a black
ash shed, in a dilapidated hovel, in a stink-
house yard, next door to a railway arch, with
a bone factory next door and a guano factory
over the way, and they would both become
chronic dipsomaniacs."

* Lees-Raper Lecture.

56
The deplorable increase of drinking among
women — with its terrible consequences upon
child-life and the future of the race — is attri-
buted, to a considerable extent, to working
and home conditions. Sir Lauder Brunton,
physician at St. Bartholomew's Hospital,
speaking at the Conference on Child Mortality,*
said : —

j Why do mothers go to the public house ? A penny-
worth of gin means much more to the mother than
mere gin. In many cases it means light and warmth
; that the mother cannot get in her own poor house.
How are we to supply this want so that we shall not
do the mothers and children harm by excluding them
from the public houses ? Let us supply them with
places where they can go and get for a penny warm
cocoa or coffee and a bit of bread with the warmth
they desire. . . .The mothers must have a more
decent home life, and live in more sanitary surroundings.

Dr. Sheridan Delepine, Director of the
Public Health Laboratory, Manchester, also
declares his conviction that the home life
of the poor wife is in cases responsible for
drinking.f

The curse of drink is not confined to the public house,

it follows the mother to her miserable home

A poor woman with a large family in the midst of
sordid poverty, from which there seems no possible
escape, must ultimately lose hope for better things,
become reckless in her actions as a drowning man in
his movements.

Medical testimony of a similar nature could

* Tribune, March 4th, 1907.
t Ibid.

57
be quoted without limit, all going to prove
it is the conviction of the men who, by train-
ing and the experience of their daily work,
are qualified to be heard on this question —
that the poverty and sordid conditions, and
ignorance, strongly pre-dispose to drink among
women. Industrial conditions are also res-
ponsible for the increase of drinking among
women. The Report of the Departmental
Committee on Physical Deterioration* states
that in Nottingham, where so many women
are employed in lace factories, twice as many
women as men are received into the Asylum
whose insanity is ascribed to drink.

Whatever conditions, whether they be in
the factory or workshop, in the home or in
the surroundings, which tend to enfeeble the
health of the people, encourage indulgence in
drink. The ill-nurtured child which survives
to manhood has a constitution which is in-
capable of offering resistance to disease, and
to temptation to indulgence.! The housing
and insanitary surroundings of a large pro-
portion of our population necessarily have the
effect of impairing the vitality oi this part of
our race. A report presented to the Liverpool
City Council on January 14th, 1904, pointed

* Report par. 170.

t People who have not food enough turn to drink to
satisfy their cravings, and also to support their en-
feebled hearts by alcohol. Dr. Niven, Physical
Deterioration Report, p. 30.

5»
out that, while the general death-rate for the
city is about 22 per 1,000 per annum, in
certain areas the rate rises to 63 per 1,000,
and in another case even to 83. The Report of
the Medical Officer to the London County
Council for 1903 draws attention to the wide
disparity between the health of two areas
within the county. He says : —

Comparing males in the two communities, out of
1,000 born in Southwark, 326 die before reaching five
years of age ; while in Hampstead, out of 1,000 born,
only 189 die before reaching the age of five years.
Again, out of a 1,000 children aged five in Southwark,
40 die before reaching the age of 15 ; while in Hamp-
stead the corresponding number is 24. At ages 25-45,
when probably, so far as the community is concerned,
the economic value of life is at a maximum, the differ-
ences in the two communities is most marked. Thug,
of 1,000 males aged 25 living in Southwark, 236 die
before reaching the age of 45 years ; while the cor-
responding figure for Hampstead is only 125.

The explanation of the difference in mor-
tality is to be found in the fact that in South-
wark over 70 per cent, of the population were
living in small tenements, while in Hampstead
less than 30 per cent, were so housed ; in
Southwark nearly 10 per cent, were housed
in one-roomed tenements, while in Hampstead
this proportion was only 2 per cent. In
Finsbury, where the population of one-roomed
tenements is 14,516, the death-rate per 1,000
in 1903 was 38-9, yet the rate among occupants
of four rooms, or more, was only 56.

59

The Royal Commission on Housing pointed
out the connection between bad housing and
drink. They said that the evils of drink, over-
crowding and poverty, act and re-act on each
other. Lord Shaftesbury said (Report p. 15)
" I am certain the people who are in that
condition have been made so by the condition
of the houses in which they live."

The Committee on Physical Deterioration,
quoting from Booth's Life and Labour in
London say, " Drink is fostered by bad
houses ; crowded homes send men to the
public-house ; crowding [is] the main cause of
drink and vice." Dr. T. W. Hime, formerly
Medical Officer of Health for the City of
Bradford, in a lecture on the Housing question
delivered on November 27th, 1896, said : —

He had no doubt that thousands of slum dwellers
resorted to the use of stimulants to brace themselves
up in a morning, because under the conditions under
which they lived they had not been able to obtain
a sufficiently refreshing sleep ; and he urged that it
could scarcely be a matter for surprise that they should
prefer the comfort of the public house to their own
homes. If those who were richer and better edu-
cated were exposed to a tithe of the temptations of
these poor people, we should find probably that they
offered less resistance to these temptations. The
wonder was that under these conditions the poor pre-
served their virtues to the extent they did.

The evil of bad housing and insanitation is
not confined to the towns, but it is working
ruin and driving to drink in the less thickly
populated areas. A very striking description

6o
of the state of a colliery village in Co. Durham
is quoted* by Mr. Fred Topham, who is Agent
to the United Kingdom Alliance for the North
Eastern district, and who is the most orthodox
of temperance men : —

The first thing that strikes one in viewing Chop-
well is that such a splendid opportunity should have
been lost of creating a model village. Chopwell is
a modern colliery village, set amidst most beautiful sur-
roundings. Civilisation has toiled on through the
ages, and offers this as her latest contribution to pro-
gress ! Squalor prevails everywhere ; the streets are
a disgrace — in truth, being little better than bogs.
Decent people can with difficulty live there and
remain decent, being placed alongside of degenerate
neighbours, and witnessing rows and disgusting affrays
nightly in the streets.

No one takes an interest in the place ; it is left
to work out its own salvation alone. There is no
social life, few amusements of any worth. Amidst
such lack of interest and squalor, it is not surprising
that the miner finds his Mecca in the large ' Chopwell
Hotel.' Friday night is one vast orgy ; money is liter-
ally thrown about. The great difficulty is to find
change for the gold sovereigns, of which I am told
£270 are changed on a single pay night. The street
reeks of beer.

Though the town is placed high up in a beautiful
airy country, the health bill is deplorable ; consump-
tion is frequent, typhoid seldom absent, large numbers
always on the sick list. Excuses are vain. As a
product of modern civilisation, where the most favour-
able conditions were afforded, it stands condemned.

The Housing conditions in Co. Durham are
notoriously bad, both in the colliery villages

* Public House Trusts, p. 26.

6i
and in the large towns. The county of
Glamorgan has an equally bad pre-eminence.
It is instructive to compare the convictions
for drunkenness in these two counties with the
figures for the North Riding of Yorkshire and
Devonshire, two adjacent counties : —

Convictions for

Drunkenness per

10,000 of population

Durham —

County Petty Sessional Divisions . . . . 115

Yorkshire, North Riding —

County Petty Sessional Divisions . . . . 38

Glamorgan —

County Petty Sessional Division (including

two small Boroughs) . . . . . . . . 164

Devonshire —

County Petty Sessional Divisions ... . . 27

To emphasise further the connection between
Housing and Intemperance we have compiled
the following table showing the proportion
of convictions for drunkenness and the per-
centage of overcrowding in the following
towns : —

Total number of
persons overcrowded

Percentage of
total population

Convictions

for drunkenness

per 10,000 of

of population

Sunderland . . 43,976

30*I

104

Newcastle .... 65,605

30-5

137

Tynemouth . . 15,777

307

3Si

Gateshead 37.957

34*5

100

Cardiff 7,052

4'3

55

The number of convictions for drunkenness
per 10,000 of •population in 1906 for England
and Wales was 6n8.

62

Speaking at the Summer Assizes at York in
July, 1905, Mr. Justice Grantham said : —

Unless the people who belong to the working classes
live in decent homes, how can you be surprised that they
give way to the passion for drink ? It is the only re-
creation which they have practically from the wretched
hovels only too many of them have to live in, and pass
their time. Then the drink excites them — pleasurably
excites them — and they don't know when to stop.
They have no homes really worthy of the name to go to,
when they leave the public house, so they generally stop
till closing time, when they have had a great deal more
than it is good for them.

In view of these appalling facts none surely
will dispute the conclusion of a recent Depart-
mental Committee that " Every step gained
towards the solution of the Housing problem
is something won for sobriety."*

In spite of all that has been done by Factory
Legislation to improve working conditions,
causes very prejudicial to health still remain
in connection with most of our manufacturing
trades. For no other occupation, perhaps, has
legislation done so much as for the cotton
workers. Yet of the effects of employment in
this trade upon young boys and girls of
fourteen who have probably been bred in
unwholesome surroundings and fed on un-
natural food, Mr. Wilson, H.M. Inspector of
Factories, says: — f

The hours f will be long, fifty-five per week, and the
atmosphere he breathes very confined, perchance also

* Report, Physical Degeneration, p, 33.
f Ibid., p. 76.

«3

dusty. Employment of this character, especially if
carried on in high temperatures, rarely fosters growth
and development ; the stunted child elongates slightly
in time, but remains very thin, loses colour, the muscles
remain small, especially those of the upper limbs,
the legs are inclined to become bowed, more particu-
larly if heavy weights have to be habitually carried,
the arch of the foot flattens, and the teeth decay rapidly,
. . . . The girls exhibit the same shortness of
stature, the same miserable development, and they
possess the same sallow cheeks and carcous teeth*
I have also observed that at an age when girls brought
up under wholesome conditions usually possess a luxur-
iant growth of hair, these factory girls have a scanty
crop which, when tied back, is simply a whisp, or ' rat's
tail.'

Here again we are permitting conditions
to prevail which enervate the body and pre-
dispose to drink and vice.

But if in such a trade as that just mentioned,
physical degeneration is caused and a pre-
disposition to drink created, what must be the
effect of working in other occupations where
the conditions are infinitely worse. There is
a close connection between the degree of
drinking and the exhausting nature of an
occupation. The greater the strain and in-
tensity of the work, the more, it is found,
intemperance prevails. The United States
Labour Commissioner has published some
figures giving the percentage of wages spent
on drink by the workers in different occupa-
tions in this country and in America. From
this we find that the percentage of wages thus
spent for the four trades, cotton, woollen, iron.

64

and glass, is lowest in the woollen ; the cotton
comes next, being a little higher ; the iron
trade is ioo per cent, above the woollen ; and
the glass trade is 40 per cent, above the high
proportion attributed to the iron workers.
Every person acquainted with the character
of the respective occupations will recognise
the approximation of the expenditure upon
drink to the strain of the work.

From that impressive series of articles deal-
ing with the conditions of labour in the
" white slave " trades, we take the following
terrible confession.* Dr. Bellew, the leading
doctor in Widnes, says : —

It. would not be wise to pass a chemical worker
at the ordinary rate for Life Assurance. The work
certainly shortens life. For one thing, the men can-
not do their work unless they are half drunk. They
drink and drink. I have one patient who drinks half
a cask (18 gallons) of beer a week. They drink because
they cannot eat. I know men who have brought their
breakfasts, dinners, and teas, back home with them
from their work because they could not touch them.

There remains no need to call further
evidence to prove that the surroundings, the
houses, the lives, and the labours of the people
are fruitful causes of intemperance. Drink
finds its victims in every grade of society, but
it is among the lowly of the land that its
ravages are most devastating. The poor have
few interests and fewer pleasures. Their lives
are dull, dreary, and monotonous. Their

* White Slaves of England, Sherrard.

65
poverty is in very truth their destruction. The
drink question is inextricably intertwined
with all the questions which aim at the
elimination of the social waste of human
health, of human life, of labour and of wealth.

66

Chapter VII.

Other Causes of Drinking.

In the foregoing chapters we have been
endeavouring to prove that poverty, in the
sense in which we have denned the term is
the most important cause of drinking. But
in attaching so much importance to con-
ditions of life and labour as bearing on the
drink question we have no desire to mini-
mise the influence of other contributory
causes. When trying to find an explanation
for the apparent contradiction between the
generally accepted opinion that temperance
sentiment has been growing while the Drink
Bill has been increasing, we suggested that
the reason was to be found in the changed
character of the occupations of a considerable
portion of the working population, whereby
they are under less supervision and discipline,
and more constantly open to the temptations
of the public-house and the invitations of their
acquaintances to cement the bond of good-
fellowship.

Much drinking is for no other reason than
that it is supposed to be sociable to spend *

6 7
one's money in paying for drink for a friend
who neither needs nor desires It. Drinking,
as a social custom, and not because those who
drink like the drink or are unable to resist
it, is responsible for a vast amount of money
spent upon it. Man is a social animal, and
drinking alcohol with his fellows is one of
the unfortunate ways in which the social
spirit has found expression. This phase of
the drink question is not only responsible
for an enormous and altogether wasteful ex-
penditure upon drink, but it is often the
cause of bringing men and women to ruin by
creating a desire for drink or rousing in them
some hitherto dormant hereditary disposition.
A. third, and very important, cause of
df hiking; and especially of excessive drink-*
ing and frequent tippling arises from the
opportunity, or as we should prefer to put it,
the encouragement to drink by the oppor-
tunities provided. There are those who will
put themselves to any trouble or inconvenience
to get drink, but it is undoubtedly true that
the great body of moderate drinkers would
never feel the loss of drink if it were removed
from their path, and certainly would not put
themselves to much inconvenience to get it.
But the presence of the public-house every-
where is a perpetual invitation to thoughtlessly
indulge in drink ; and the business of the pub-
lican is to encourage his customers to support
his trade.

63
Broadly speaking then, an enquiry into the
drink question reveals the fact that it is in
its causes and its effects exceedingly complex ;
but there are certain outstanding features
which enable us to form conclusions as to the
nature of the disease and the conditions and
causes and influences which pre-dispose to
drinking. These have been dealt with under
the three divisions of (i) conditions as to life
and labour, (2) social customs, (3) the encour-
agement offered by the existence of the trade.

The treatment of the question must be in
accordance with this diagnosis. As the
causes of drinking are many and varied, so
the remedies applied must be numerous and
diverse. That drinking which is due to the
first-named cause is not likely to be easily
abolished. To effect that result involves a
revolution of our industrial and social system.
It involves the destruction of that monopoly
in the means of life which enables a few to
amass riches at the expense and degradation
and poverty of the many. It involves a
changed ideal in our political life, and a new
conception of the nature of wealth. It re-
quires the political life of the nation to be
enthused with a religious determination to
use the powers of law-making and of govern-
ment to ensure a full opportunity to every
child to develop its physical and mental
possibilities. And this involves the parental
care of the State in protecting the child from

69
the disastrous influences which to-day damn
millions of infants from the moment of their
birth ; and it involves, too, a belief and
practice that the first use of wealth should be
to ensure for each a sufficiency of all the
things which go to make the abundant life.
It involves an appreciation of the whole
problem of social waste, waste of wealth pro-
ducing power, waste through misapplied
labour, waste through misdirection and un-
equal distribution of wealth, waste through
lack of organisation, waste through keeping
ignorant and inefficient the masses who have
infinite possibilities for goodness and great-
ness. This part of the drink question will
settle itself as the conditions of life and
labour which give rise to drinking are
changed ; and the work to this end which is
immediately practicable and desirable will be
discussed at a later stage of this enquiry.

The second of the important factors in the
drink question lies within the legitimate
sphere of the work of the Temperance
societies, the teacher, and the preacher who
should aim at disseminating a more general
knowledge of the foolishness of senseless
drinking, and at substituting more reason-
able ideas of expressing the feeling of fellow-
ship.

The third contributory cause of drinking
is within the sphere of legislation and admin-
istration. By direct action in removing

70
opportunities and encouragements undoubtedly
a large volume of drinking which is not due
to deep-seated causes will be eliminated.

7i

Chapter VIII.
Social Reform and Temperance.

In dealing with the industrial and social
conditions of the people as a cause of drinking
we specially emphasised (i) low wages, (2)
long hours, (3) casual work and unemploy-
ment, (4) insanitary housing, (5) ignorance of
hygiene, (6) lack of education, (7) absence of
interest in elevating things. We pointed out
the close connection between the extent to
which these conditions existed in any industry
or district, and the degree of drunkenness
which prevailed. If this connection has been
established, then it becomes the duty of every-
one who wants to lessen drunkenness to be
active in the forefront of social reform work.

The average income of the working class
family is not sufficient, however wisely it may
be spent, to provide a sufficiency of good
food, of good clothing, and of house accom-
modation, with other such absolute necessaries
as fire and furniture. Wages are too low to
rear healthy children upon. Out of a single
wage of a pound or twenty-five shillings a
week, with a family to support, it is impos-

72

sible to pay a rent of eight or ten shillings a
week, which is the least sum for which a
house in a decent neighbourhood, with suffi-
cient accommodation for a family, can be
obtained in most of our large towns and
cities. Low wages compel the family to live
in an overcrowded condition in a neighbour-
hood which is insanitary because of its over-
crowded state. The result of the combination
—overcrowding and insufficient nourishment
— is to starve the children, who grow up to
swell the army of industrial inefficients and
unemployables and the victims of the drink
appetite.
The State has recognised the necessity and
the wisdom of insisting upon a minimum of
sanitation in factories and workshops. To
preserve the health of the individuals, because
of the loss of wealth-producing power through
inefficiency and ill-health, we have had the
innumerable statutes regulating hours and
conditions of labour. Outside the workshop,
and due to the same appreciation of the waste
caused by neglecting to apply knowledge to
prevent disease, we have the Public Health
Acts, the Food Adulteration laws, the hospitals
and dispensaries for the treatment of disease
at the public expense. But not yet have we
applied this principle where it is most needed,
and where the benefits would be greatest.
We insist upon the factory worker, in the
interests of his health, having a certain amount

73
of air space. But we take no thought as to
whether he. is being paid a wage which will
enable him to get enough food to sustain
him, or a home in which he can rest and be
restored. And yet this is a matter which
comes in ord<r of importance before those
to which we have given some attention. A
State, alive to the importance of saving
waste, of getting the best and most out of its
material, would lay down that the first charge
upon all production was a wage which would
in no case be below a sum adequate to main-
tain the worker and his dependents in a state
of health and comfort. This would be found
to be a policy of highly remunerative social
economy. What is humanely right can never
be economically unsound, and the economy of
high wages, even from the employers' point of
view, which is not always that of society, is
now being increasingly recognised.

The demand for a shorter working day by
law can be defended on many grounds, but by
no means the least important of the arguments
in its favour is that its adoption would result
in a great improvement in the character of
the workers. All experience supports this
optimistic expectation. Each reduction in
the hours of labour in the textile trades has
been followed by a spontaneous rise in the
standard of life of the operatives. The latest
reduction of hours in this trade — the twelve
o'clock Saturday stop — has been of enormous

74
benefit. In fine weather advantage is taken
of cheap excursions, and the general use of
the cycle on a Saturday afternoon is seen in
the crowded state of the roads giving
exit from the manufacturing towns in the
north. The Chancellor of the Exchequer,
speaking in the House of Commons on April
15th, 1905, referred to the fact that the great
boom in the cotton trade has not, as former
booms in the trade had, increased the
consumption of drink. If the Chancellor had
had a sufficient knowledge of facts, he would
have been able to add that the operation of the
twelve o'clock stop, the giving of more leisure
to the workers which they had wisely
employed, was one of the main reasons for the
fact he stated.

There is a point at which a reduction in the
working day might not have such satisfactory
results. A cutting off of but a very little from
the end of a long day of very hard work
would probably lead to increased drinking,
for the workmen would leave work in an ex-
hausted state and incapable of the effort to take
'up any new pastime except sitting in a public
house. The important thing to remember is
that the hours of labour should not be so long
as to completely tire the workman, and the
leisure left between ceasing work and bed-
time should be so long as to be worth the
effort to turn to some interesting pastime or
recreation. This is the secret of the great

75
success of the twelve o'clock Saturday stop.
The operatives have had a short day, they
leave work comparatively fresh, and by the
time they are washed and dressed the whole
afternoon is still before them.

Striking confirmation of this argument is
furnished by Mr. John Rae,* who, in an article
on the effects of the general adoption of the
Eight Hours Day in Australia, says that
largely as a result of the Eight Hours Day
there is growing up in Australia a working
class population which for intelligence and
sobriety have no equals among the Anglo-
Saxon race, and the like of which has never
been seen in the world before. He mentions
the very significant fact that the people who
oppose the Shorter Day in Australia are the
publicans, for they have discovered that when
a man leaves work not completely exhausted,
but with a little vitality left, he has no desire
to spend his time sitting in a public house,
but feels impelled to take some outdoor
recreation or to engage in some intellectual
study.

We might multiply similar testimony, but
we will be content to give but two or three
other exceedingly valuable testimonies to the
usefulness of a reduction in the hours of labour
in promoting temperance reform.f

* Economic Journal, May, 1901.
t Further evidence of the effect of the shorter hours on
sobriety is given in Appendix III.

76
The following valuable testimony is taken
from a report issued by the Society for
promoting Industry and Trade in Russia,
extracts from which appeared in the Labour
Gazette for March, 1906. It relates to an
experimental reduction of the working day from
twelve to eight hours in a paper mill at Dobrush
in the province of Moghilev. The Manager,
Dr. Stulchinsky, writes as follows on the
results of the working of this experiment for
a year and a half : —

I have been managing Prince Paslrievitch's mill
for twenty years. The nature of the business requires
that the work be carried on night and day. Up to
May, 1894, the length of the shifts was 12 hours. Eigh-
teen months ago I determined to try and reduce the
hours of those working by the day to 9, and of those
employed on shifts to 8. Instead of increased drinking
by the workmen, the result has been that the only
drink-shop in the place has had to give up business, its
place being taken by a tea-shop, where only moderate
quantities of spirits can be obtained. ' Saint Monday '
is almost a thing of the past. The older people, as a
rule, employ their leisure time in tilling their plot of
land, which they formerly let on lease. The younger
ones have taken to reading. An orchestral and vocal
union has been established, of which 36 factory opera-
tives are members. Between 400 and 500 operatives
regularly attend lectures got up by the local priest.
Such things were impossible under the whole 12 hours
system ; for there is only one recreation for exhausted
workers and that is spirit drinking, which quickly stimu-
lates their energies.

The irregularity of work and the frequent
periods of total unemployment have a de-
moralising effect upon the character of the

77
men affected. All who have been brought
into touch with the unemployed have been
painfully impressed by the rapid deterioration
of moral strength and self-respect which a
period of want of work develops in the
formerly respectable workman. It is quite
natural that a man who feels that society
cares so little about him that it is content to
let him starve, will soon get into a frame of
mind in which he cares not what society
thinks of him. He feels that he is a social out-
cast, a useless cumberer of the earth. Human
help and human sympathy are denied to him,
and it is not to be wondered that he finds
comfort and forgetfulness in drink.

Irregular employment is almost equally de-
structive and demoralising in its effects. In
the intervals between intermittent work the
casual is open to every temptation to drink.
He is enfeebled in body by insufficiency of
food, and when the luck of a few days' work
comes round again he feels the need for a
stimulant, which he ignorantly tries to find
in drink.

Work for the unemployed; the better
organisation of labour, so that workmen may
settle into regular and steady habits, are
temperance reforms of the first magnitude.
Intimately bound up in this question of the
better organisation of labour is that of system-
atic overtime, which is economically unsound,
physically injurious, and morally debasing.

78

The facts given in a previous chapter bear-
ing on the relation between housing and
intemperance are *a powerful appeal to the
temperance reformer to lend the weight of his
support to the municipal reformer, who is
agitating to sweep away the disease-haunted,
drink-sodden slum, and to provide habitations
in which it is possible for human beings to
be self-respecting, healthy, and sober.

From an unexpected quarter confirmation
of the effect of better housing on sobriety was
given at the meeting of the Bath Brewery
Company by the Chairman (Colonel H. F.
Clutterbuck), October 14th, 1904. Speaking
of the decrease of drinking, he said : —

He thought himself that it was partly due perhaps
to the fact that the nation was growing more sober . . .
and also he thought it was largely due to the better
housing of the working clas3. A man now-a-days in-
stead of going home to a dirty, untidy cottage, full
of children in one room, found that his house was
more comfortable.

It is indisputable that the ignorance of the
working classes about health matters, food,
and the rearing of children is responsible for
much of the physical degeneracy which in its
turn leads to drinking. One of the painful
things about working class family life is that,
small and inadequate as the income is how-
ever well laid out, the income is often so
expended as not to give the best results. The
respective values of different kinds of food is
unknown to them, as, far too often, is a know-

79
ledge of how to prepare the food. Infant
mortality, as is proved beyond doubt, is due
as much to wrong feeding as to the lack of
food. Instead of homely, health-giving foods
forming the staple of the workers' fare, highly
seasoned, " appetising,' ' prepared foods are
consumed, which ruin the digestion, provoke
thirst, and drive to drink.

The class of house which is to-day being
erected for respectable working class families
is only possible because of the ignorance of
the people who are to inhabit them as to the
conditions of health. If the people were educa-
ted to know what is the minimum of air space
necessary for health, we should not have the
bye-laws of the Public Health Authority
satisfied with but two-thirds of the air-space
for the honest worker which is insisted upon
for the criminal in our gaols.

A knowledge of the laws of health is the
greatest educational need of our age. Some
part of that time which is now given in our
schools to teaching the ancient mythologies, and
learning the tricks of figures and the meaning
of words might be far more profitably de-
voted to teaching the boys and girls — the
citizens of to-morrow — how to keep their
bodies healthy and pure ; and to preparing ;
the girls for the great responsibility of mother-
hood, a responsibility which comes upon them
to-day and finds them in most cases totally
ignorant of how to_discharge it.

8o

There still survives much ignorant super-
stition about the virtue and value of alcohol.
Temperance teaching from a temperance plat-
form has two grave defects. It is given to the
people who do not require conversion, and if
it reaches the ear of the sinner it fails to strike
conviction because of the prejudice against its
source. The teaching of temperance, of the
truth about alcohol, should be the work, not
of a voluntary body, but of the State, which
pays so heavily for the prevailing ignorance
upon the question.

The request for such teaching as a part of
the school curriculum was put before the Board
of Education in 1904 in a petition signed by
14,718 medical men. After calling attention
to what has been achieved in this direction
by English-speaking nations, in regard to the
teaching of the nature and effects of alcohol in
the Army schools and in some of the principal
colonies, the petitioners state that a wide-
spread ignorance prevails concerning, not only
the nature and properties of alcohol, but also
its effects on the body and the mind. They,
therefore, urged the central education authori-
ties to include in the simple hygienic teaching
desired, elementary instruction at an early age
on the nature and effects of alcohol. They
also urged the necessity of ensuring that the
training of all teachers shall include adequate
instruction in these subjects.

Such regular and systematic teaching would

8i

do much to save the next generation from
drink. Not much, it is to be feared, but some-
thing might be done on the same lines for the
present generation of adults by the Public
Health departments regarding alcoholism as
a danger as great as typhoid, and taking
equally drastic steps to arrest its ravages.
The sporadic posting of a few placards point-
ing out the dangers of alcohol is not enough.
The placards posted by more than a hundred
cities and boroughs in 1905 were excellent,
but the effect was lost when the first shower
of rain washed them from the hoardings.*
The warning needs to be as constantly before
the eyes as the temptation to take the drink.

Not merely is knowledge of the laws of
health involved in the temperance question,
but the whole subject of education too. The
man without education is on the level of
the brute ; his appetites and tastes will be
those of the brute. The ignorant, uneducated
man has such a limited number of interests
that drink can easily claim him for its own.
The spread of education, with its widening
of outlook and increase of interests, will do
great things for Temperance Reform. Educa-
tion must accompany increased power and
enlarged opportunities, or better not the
power, better not the opportunity. In the
extension of real education — the drawing out

*Newcastle-on-Tyne, with a population of 264,000,
posted 100 placards on the posting stations.
F

82

of the best — we shall be substituting for the
low taste, which now finds gratification in
the pothouse and the sensuous pleasures of
the cup, a love of " things which are more
excellent."

The social instinct is eternally implanted in
the human breast. It will find some means
of expression. For lack of something better,
the public-house has become the centre of
social intercourse. An increase in the number
of things in which a man is interested will
reduce both the amount of time he can spend
in the public-house, and his inclination to do
it. The provision of other centres of social
intercourse of a less objectionable character
would also withdraw men from the publichouse.
The institution of the " two turns a night "
music-hall with cheap charges, it is said, has
affected the public-houses most disastrously
from the brewers' point of view. The enter-
tainment of a cheap music-hall may not be
the most ideal and intellectual of pastimes,
but it is infinitely preferable to the public-
house; and the person who begins his musical
education with the popular song may by and
by attain to an appreciation of the classical
ballad

The keener interest in politics taken by the
working classes, which is shown in the re-
markable progress of the Labour and Socialist
movement, will have a beneficial effect upon
Temperance. The Socialist movement is not

83
only absorbing the spare time of a great
many working men, but its propaganda is
providing a counter attraction to the public-
house. It is within the knowledge of the
writer that thousands of men in the aggregate
attend the Sunday evening Socialist meetings
who formerly spent those evenings in the
public-house. The interest in social ques-
tions which is aroused thereby has a transiorm-
ing influence on the man ; he has found a new
and inspiring purpose for his spare activities,
and this gives him an ideal of the seriousness
of life which is inconsistent with the waste of
his time in drinking.

In the same way the great working class
organisations — the trade unions, the co-opera-
tive societies, the friendly societies — have done
much, by increasing the interests and activi-
ties of working men, to counteract the in-
fluence of the public-house. It is unnecessary
to further pursue this argument. Its sound-
ness is obvious, its truth is proved by univer-
sal experience.

Two witnesses to support the contentions
urged in this chapter may be called. In Jan-
uary, 1903, Mr. Justice Lawrence had a maiden
Assize at Huntingdon, and in remarking upon
this he said that he looked to good air, pure
water, effective drainage, sanitary houses, and
reasonable amusements to improve the drink-
ing habits of the people more than repres-
sive legislation. A witness giving evidence

V

»4

before the Committee on Small Holdings in
1906 said :

The relieving officer has on more than one occasion
informed me that there is not now a single able-bodied
man receiving out-door relief, and the Superintendent of
Police, some years ago, in his report for Quarter Sessions,
stated that, in his opinion, the decrease in drunkenness
was attributable to the spread of allotments and small
holdings around CatshilL

Social Reform is the most effective Tem-
perance Reform. To make our country
sober, we must make its people free. The
reforms outlined in this chapter are only
palliatives, but they are palliatives which
will so improve the physical and mental state
of the workers that the social revolution will
be much more speedily realised.

85

Chapter IX.

Drink and Economic Poverty.

If one ventures to state that drink is not
the chief cause of poverty, one is sure to be
charged from certain quarters with a desire
to minimise the evils of intemperance, with
being an aider and abettor of brewers, and
a friend of publicans and sinners. To many
well-meaning people, the whole social pro*
blem resolves itself into one word — Drink.
The economic teaching of the Socialists has
compelled the teetotallers of the type men-
tioned to moderate their statements when
closely pressed ; but the frequency with which
one still meets the dogma in temperance
literature and speeches shows that the belief
is still widely held and propagated.

In the Alliance Almanac for 1908, Sir
George White writes : — " If the working
classes of this country spent (in drink) only
at the same rate as the same classes in
America and Germany, £50,000,000 would be
saved from the drink traffic, and be trans-
ferred to useful branches of industry, find-
ing full employment for at least two millions
extra people, and thus give occupation to
all capable of working."

86
One of the most moderate of Tem-
perance writers* states the case in words
which fairly express the opinion of the general
body of the Temperance party. He says,
" The common sale and consumption of
alcoholic drink — apart from all other evils of
intemperance — is by far the most potent

FACTOR IN THE PRODUCTION OF POVERTY."

Even such a well-informed social student
as Sir T. P. Whittaker has committed himself
to a statement very similar. He says :f

How is it we have all this poverty, misery, disease,
and death ? Drink and Drinking is responsible for a very
large proportion of it. It is the chief cause. Directly
or indirectly it is responsible for the greater part of the
poverty, crime, incompetence, sickness, and early death,
which afflict the great mass of our poorer classes.

It is with real regret that one is compelled
to expose the error and absurdity of the
claim that drink is the chief cause of poverty.
One would earnestly wish that the industrial
and social evils that exist could be traced
to such a simple cause. The work of the
social reformer would be indeed simplified if
by the suppression of drinking the problem
of poverty could be solved.

In preceding chapters we have dealt at
length with the causes of drinking, proving
that poverty in the wide sense of the term
is one of the most fruitful causes. But we
have never attempted to deny that drinking

* J. Stewart Gavin, Alliance News, March 26th, 1897.
t Economics of Drink, p. 52.

87
was a cause of poverty in individual cases,
nor that it did not in a great many others
aggravate poverty. Socialists have no desire
to minimise the economic evils of drinking ;
what they do protest against is the false
assumption that the poverty of the workers
is caused by their drinking habits, and that
if it were not for their expenditure upon
drink their economic poverty would not
exist.

The testimony of Mr. John Burns on this
point is so telling, and is expressed in such
forceful and picturesque language, that we
must reproduce it. He says : — *

They lie in their teeth when they say that the un-
employed are drunken and improvident. Here
stand I, a skilled artisan, a teetotaller, a vegetarian,
a Malthusian, a non-smoker. I have been out of
work for four months. I haven't tasted food for
twenty-four hours. There stands my wife. She
has turned the ribbons of her bonnet over and over
again to make them look respectable. If this be my
condition, what must it be for men who are not me-
chanics and have families to maintain.

The conclusions of Mr. Charles Booth and
Mr. Rowntree have been so often quoted
that they are generally known, but it may
be useful to repeat them for the sake of
reference.

The figures Mr. Charles Booth gives relate
to some 4,000 cases, 1,600 belonging to the
" very poor " and 2,400 to " the poor." Of
the " very poor "

* Daily Chronicle, November 22nd, 1885.

88

4 per cent, were loafers.

14 per cent, were due to drink and thriftlessness.
27 per cent, were due to large families, illness, etc.
55 per cent, to questions of employment.

Of the " poor"

13 per cent, due to drink and thriftlessness.
19 per cent, due to large families, illness, etc.
68 per cent, to " unemployment."

In explanation of these figures Mr. Booth
says : " To those who look upon drink as the
source of all evil, the position it here holds
as accounting for only 14 per cent, of the
poverty in the East End, may seem altogether
insufficient ; but I may remind them that it
is only as principal cause that it is here con-
sidered ; as a contributory cause it would, no
doubt, be connected with a much larger pro-
portion."

Mr. Seebohm Rowntree gives us the
following results of his investigations into
the causes of poverty in York.

(1) LIVING IN " PRIMARY " POVERTY.
Definition : Earnings insufficient to obtain mini-
mum necessaries for physical efficiency.

Cause. Number.

Death of chief bread-winner 1,130

Illness or old age 370

Out-of-work 167

Chronic irregularity of work 205

Largeness of family 1,602

Lowness of wage 3*75^

7*230
In addition to these 7,230 living in " pri-
mary " poverty, as defined above, Mr. Rown-
tree found 13,072 persons living in "secon-
dary " poverty. Secondary poverty is defined

89

as that of families whose total earnings
would be sufficient for the maintenance of
merely physical efficiency were no part of
them absorbed by other expenditure, either
useful or wasteful. As to " secondary "
poverty in York, Mr. Rowntree gives the
following as " immediate causes ":

Drink, betting, and gambling, ignorant or care-
less housekeeping, and other improvident expenditure,
the latter often induced by irregularity of income.

And, as to the first causes, he says :

Though we speak of the above causes as those mainly
accounting for most of the " secondary " poverty,
it must not be forgotten that they are themselves often
the outcome of the adverse conditions under which too
many of the working classes live. Housed for the
most part in sordid streets, frequently under over-
crowded and unhealthy conditions, compelled very
often to earn their bread by monotonous and laborious
work, and unable, partly through limited education,
and partly through overtime, and other causes of phy-
sical exhaustion, to enjoy intellectual recreation, what
wonder that many of these people fall a ready prey to
the publican and the bookmaker ?

Professor A. G. Warner has collected the
reports of trained investigators in England,
Germany, and America, and he makes the
following summary of their conclusions :

Probably nothing in the tables of the causes of poverty,
as ascertained by cold counting, will more surprise the
average reader than the fact that intemperance is
held to be the chief cause in only one-fifteenth
to one - fifth of the cases ; and that where an
attempt is made to learn in how many cases it

go
had a contributory influence its presence cannot be
traced at all in more than 28*1 per cent, of the cases.

If Mr. Charles Booth seeks to imply that
14 per cent, of his investigated cases are in
poverty entirely through intemperance then
we oin issue with him. But he does not
maintain, so far as we can gather, that even
in the cases where he assigns Drink as the
cause of the poverty, that abstinence would
raise the family above the poverty line. Mr.
Rowntree, at any rate, makes no such bold
assertion in regard to York. The rule in
these investigations seems to have been to
put down Drink as a cause wherever it was
found that some portion of the family in-
come was spent upon it. If a considerable
portion of the income of a poor family is
spent in drink it certainly aggravates their
poverty ; but this foolish expenditure of a
too small income is not the cause of the
poverty. The family would still be poor if
they were teetotallers.

But even if it were granted that 14 per cent,
of the poverty of the poor is due to drinking,
and that if these people were temperate they
would be raised out of poverty — a contention
which we by no means admit — it is evident that
the statement that total abstinence would carry
with it the virtual abolition of poverty is
a wild exaggeration.

In the report of the Royal Commission
on the Aged Poor issued in 1895, Mr. Cham-
berlain, Mr. Ritchie, Dr. Hunter, Mr. Charles

91

Booth, and Sir H. Maxwell made the following
statement :

We also agree that the imputation that old age
pauperism is mainly due to drink, idleness, improvi-
dence, and the like causes, applies to but a very small
proportion of the working-class population.

When teetotallers talk about drink being
the cause of poverty it is charitable to sup-
pose that by poverty they mean a condition
below that of ordinary respectable working
class life. But if this be so, if their idea of
the abolition of poverty is the raising of
those who are below up to the standard
of the thrifty artisans, with, say, a family
income, economically spent, of thirty
shillings a week, then their ideas of poverty
and those of the Socialists are widely differ-
ent. But to attain even to that state of
working-class affluence would require an
improvement enormously vaster than the
Temperance people imagine. Taking Sir
George White's statement, quoted al/ove,
where he says that the transfer of
£50,000,000 a year from the drink bill io
other channels of employment wouM fifi'l
work for two millions extra workj/eoj/J*,
it appears that, assuming every penny of ih\%
went in wages, these extra people wouj/l
receive less than 10s- a week per hea/J, 'Mm
payment of a wage of le» than v*, '* w»k
for useful work is the Tempera*^ pw '*y'*
ideal solution of the problems of poverty mA
unemployment*

The Temperance party estimate that the
average annual expenditure on intoxicants
by those of the working classes who drink
is £17 14s. 2d. per family. Sir T. P.
Whittaker, commenting on this waste, says,
" What a difference would £17 14s. 2d. per
family make if properly and prudently
spent." Quite true; but seven shillings a
week per family does not make the difference
between poverty and a desirable standard of
life.

Those who maintain that drink is the main
cause of poverty know little of the extent
of poverty. Mr. Booth states that 307 per
cent, of the whole population of London
are on or below the poverty line of incomes
not exceeding one guinea a week per
family. Mr. Rowntree found that the
average wage for the labourer in York is
from 18s. to 21s. a week, whereas the mini-
mum expenditure necessary to maintain,
in a state of physical efficiency, a family of
two adults and three children, is 21s. 8d.
" The wages," he says, " paid for unskilled
labour in York are insufficient to provide
food, shelter and clothing adequate to main-
tain a family of moderate size in a state of
bare physical efficiency, no allowance being
made for any expenditure other than that
absolutely required for the maintenance of
merely physical efficiency."

Speaking at Perth on June 5th, 1903, Sir

93

H. Campbell-Bannerman said: —

In this country we know — thanks to the patient
and scientific investigations of Mr. Rowntree and
Mr. Charles Booth, both in different fields and by different
methods, but arriving at the same results, which has
never been questioned — we know that there is about
30 per cent, of our population under-fed, on the verge of
hunger, doubtful day by day of the sufficiency of their'
food. Thirty per cent. ! What is the population of
the United Kingdom ? Forty-one millions. Thirty per
cent, of 41 millions comes to something over 12 millions.

Beyond this class of " underfed " millions
" always on the verge of hunger " are the vast
masses of the slightly better paid workers
whose lives are unceasing struggles to keep
above the poverty line.

The common sight of a man losing his
employment through drink, and the equally
familiar instance of a teetotaller " getting
on," seems to lend support to the idea that
drink is a cause of unemployment and poverty.
But a little consideration shows how rash is
such a conclusion. Drink is a selecting agent.
The teetotaller, if otherwise equally well
qualified, will be preferred to the man who drinks.
But when a teetotaller takes the job of a
drinker, there has not been any additional
employment created. One man was out
before. Drink has now selected a different
man to take his place.

94

Chapter X.
The Economics of Temperance.

Socialists maintain that the poverty of
the wage-earners is caused by their econ-
omic subjection to landlordism and capital-
ism. The landlord owns land. The people
must have access to the land. So the land-
owner is able to exact a rent for the use of
his land ; and the amount of this rent is
determined by the competition for the use of
particular sites and the means of the persons
who require the land. Every increase of
population, therefore, increases the competition
for land ; every increase in the wealth of the
community enables the landlord to exact
more rent. " Every permanent improvement
of the soil, every railway and road, every
bettering of the general condition of society,
every facility given for production, every
stimulus supplied to consumption, raises
rent."*

The power of the capitalist is analogous.
The conditions of modern industry require
that the workers must have access to large
units of capital if they are to be profitably

* Thorold Rogers, Political Economy, Ch. xii.

95
employed. Their wages depend upon em-
ployment provided for them by the owners
of capital. The capitalist employs his
capital to make profit. His profit depends
upon getting labour for less wages than
the value of the wealth which labour pro-
duces. To enable him to induce the workers
to take less in wages than the value they
create, it is necessary to have a surplus of
labour competing for employment. " The
modern system of industry will not work
without some unemployed margin/' as Mr.
Charles Booth puts it. These unemployed
compete for work ; the employer wants labour
at the lowest price ; hence the tendency
is for the rate of wages to fall to the lowest
point which the workers, under necessity,
will accept. These are the two chief factors
in fixing wages — the degree of competition,
and the cost of living for the social status of
the workman.

Just as the landlord takes unearned incre-
ment, so the capitalist appropriates what he
cannot help sharing with the landowner of
the increase of wealth accruing from the
increased productivity of labour. The
wages of labour do not depend upon the
percentage of profit. A strong trade union
may sometimes gain an advance of wages
in very profitable times when labour is
scarce ; but never is the increase more than
a very small proportion of the increased
profit.

96

Temperance cannot of itself weaken the
power of the landlord and the capitalist.
The teetotal workman is just as much under
the subjection of their monopoly as is the
workman who drinks. It is " the subjection
of labour to monopoly which is the cause
of the evils and inequalities which fill the
industrial world," and so long as this sub-
jection exists, the landless and capitalless
workers, whatever their virtues, must remain
economically poor.

This statement of the cause of poverty is
not urged as a justification of the expenditure
upon drink. But it is important to know
the truth, and Temperance has sufficient to
commend it to the workers without the support
of unfounded claims.

The money spent upon drink is largely
economic waste. Only in so far as the ex-
penditure upon drink takes the place of
other refreshments which are necessary or
sustaining, can the expenditure be justified.
In so far as the drinking inflicts injury, it is
worse than an economic waste. But apart
from that, treating the question purely as
a matter of social economy, the great bulk
of the money spent on drink is waste. The
labour employed in the trade does not add
to the national wealth; it is supported by
the labour of the productive workers and
gives nothing useful in return.

But in this respect the drink traffic is in
the same position as all the occupations

97

and trades which exist to gratify the idle
and luxurious tastes of the rich. Economi-
cally there is no difference between the drink
traffic and the maintenance of flunkies or
the keeping of racers. Each finds work ; but
the persons thus employed are paid for out
of wealth extracted from the useful
workers, who have to maintain these non-
productive, useless servants. If the workers
who are employed in such occupations as
the drink trade were paid their present wages
to do nothing, nobody would be a penny
the worse. Why the expenditure upon luxuries
and personal services by the rich is foolishly
regarded as being of social advantage, is
because if the rich did not so expend their
surplus wealth, the persons they now employ
would be among the unemployed. In the
case of the rich, their expenditure upon luxuries
comes after all their necessities and reason-
able comforts have been satisfied, and, there-
fore, if it were not spent, it would not be used
to further encourage the staple industries.
But in the case of the working classes it is
different. Their expenditure upon drink,
in so far as it is unnecessary, is a diversion
of income from necessaries to absolute
waste.

Though it is true that the money spent

upon drink, and all the capital and labour

employed in the trade, is in a real sense

social waste, it by no means follows that if

G

98

it were abolished the masses of the people
would gain economically by the change. If
the traffic were abolished, the rich would
probably spend what now goes in drink in
some other form of vice or luxury, employ-
ing people in that direction quite as uselessly
as they are now occupied. But as to how
universal abstinence would effect the wage-
earning classes opinions differ and controversy
rages.

We do not think it is a very profitable
pastime to conjecture what would happen if
drink could be all at once removed. There
is no more possibility of such a thing
happening than of an invasion from Mars.
It may be good economic theory to main-
tain that universal abstinence would lower
wages, but economic theories, no more than
other sorts of theories, are universal in their
operation.

It is argued that as wages are regulated
by competition, and under competition the
tendency is for wages to fall to the point of
subsistence, if the cost of living were re-
duced by the withdrawal of some item of
hitherto recognised expenditure, wages
would fall by that amount. This assumes
that the drink expenditure at present does
form an item in the recognised minimum
standard of living. It is doubtful if this is
so. This assumes that those who spend a
fairly considerable sum in drink are the
great majority of the working men. We

99

do not think that is the case. The argument
assumes further that the standard of living
of the teetotaller is lower than that of the
drinker, which is the very reverse of the
fact. The number of working men who
spend little or nothing on drink has been in-
creasing. Granting that formerly the drink
allowance did enter into wages, meanwhile
the non-drinkers have been applying that
part of their wages to raising their standard
of living, to procuring better food, better
clothes, better homes. This has had the
result of raising the whole standard of work-
ing-class life, and this is the established " mini-
mum on which the population will choose to
subsist/ '

But the sudden abolition of the liquor
traffic would bring such absolute chaos into
the labour and commercial markets that the
state of things would be similar to that
produced by a great industrial revolution,
and the workers might be unable to resist
a considerable depression of their standard
of life. If the labour displaced by Prohibi-
tion could be immediately absorbed in other
occupations, which the Prohibitionists seem
to assume would be the case, then no reduc-
tion of wages would follow. But it would
be impossible to do that. If those workers
who now spend considerably upon drink
sought to transfer that expenditure to
useful things, these trades could not meet
the sudden demand upon them. Prices

would rise to impossible figures. The labour
suddenly displaced from the liquor trade
could not be employed in making clothing,
boots, and furniture, or even in building
houses. It would be unskilled labour, and
would be competing for employment in a
market already overcrowded. On the other
hand there is to set against the increased
demand for useful things of the former
drinkers, the withdrawal of the purchasing
power for these things of the then unem-
ployed liquor trade employees. So the
reasonable probability is that the sudden
and complete Prohibition of the liquor
traffic would not increase the demand for
goods of a useful character, but would add a
million useless persons to the unemployed ;
and the awful competition of the labour market
caused thereby would depress wages beyond
imagination.

These results would follow the enforce-
ment of universal Prohibition, though no
such consequences are to be feared from
the gradual spread of the practice of Tem-
perance. This is reform on the right lines,
and must tend to the raising of the standard
of working-class life. It is the sober, in-
telligent workmen who fight for better con-
ditions. It is they who are the best sup-
porters of the staple industries of the
country. It is they who give their children
a better start in life. It is they who are self-
respecting and self-confident. When a drinker

IOI

becomes an abstainer he does not lower his
expenditure, but he increases it. The drinker
is satisfied with a miserable existence ; the
sober workman is always striving to raise
his conditions of life.

The powers of even a sober working-class
to better their conditions are very limited
under the subjection of landlord and capit-
alist monopoly. Their conditions can only
be improved in so far as they combine and
successfully lessen the power of the mon-
opolists. Temperance in itself cannot im-
prove the economic state of the workers,
but it is a very useful condition for applying
effective means which will do so. Indeed,
if the workers are simply content to be, tem-
perate, and to allow landlordism and capit-
alism to use their powers unchecked, then the
virtue of abstinence will curse the abstainer
economically and bless the monopolists.

The result is seen in the way in which
the working-class demand for better hous-
ing benefits the landlord. Though universal
Prohibition might not be followed by lower
wages, it is pretty certain that there would
be a general rise of rents. The experience
of every-day life suggests this ; though actual
confirmation is furnished by the Temperance
Party themselves. In a pamphlet published
by the Alliance* the following innocent con-
fession is made : —

There are many places in England where no public

* The Curse and the Cure, p. 16.

102

houses exist at all. What is the condition of these
places ? A section of the township of Toxteth in
Liverpool, containing about 60,000 people, in 200
streets, with 12,000 houses, is one of these. How
docs it get on without drink shops? Have all the
respectable people rushed out of the district ? Nothing
of the sort. People are so anxious to get into the
neighbourhood that there is hardly a house to be got.
The dwelling-houses there realise rents of about
one third more than those obtained for houses of .
equal style and accommodation in liquor shop neigh-
bourhoods.

Assuming that the workers retained their
present wages, the saving of what is now
spent in drink would be equivalent to an
increase available for some other purpose.
The following extract seems to suggest
that the landlord would put in a successful
claim for this amount : —

Replying to a demand for higher wages for the
labourers in Deptford Victualling Yard, Mr. Goschen
(House of Commons, April 14th, 1899) said " that if
it were consistent with proper administrative prin-
ciples to make an advance of the wages of these
labourers, he would certainly do so. But there was a
larger question than that of the amount involved,
which was infinitesimal. If the position of the
labourers at Woolwich and Deptford was so describ-
ed, it was rather due to sweating landlords than to
the rate of wages. The wages had been raised 20
per cent, in the last ten years, and the house rents
50 per cent. It was constantly the case in those
districts that the increase of wages only led to a larger
sum going into the pockets of the landlords, and he
was even told that some of the men who were locally
the loudest in the cry for justice to the labourers were
owners of cottage property, who would benefit if the
wages were raised.

103
Of course there are ways and means of
preventing the landlords from appropriat-
ing these rewards of virtue. But to apply
them would be to apply Socialist principles,
and those who claim that temperance would
solve the poverty problem must confine
themselves to proof that temperance itself
would do this.

TEMPERANCE AND EMPLOYMENT.

The further claim made that, if the money
now spent in drink were devoted to other
and more useful objects there would be a
great increase in the volume of employment,
is without foundation. The statement of
Sir George White, M.P., already quoted,
is typical of the form in which this claim is
made. A reduction of £50,000,000 a year in
the drink bill would, he claims, find employ-
ment for two million more workers. Lejt^
us test this by a simple fact. According to
the figures of Dr. Dawson Burns the (kink
expenditure according to population was
£33,844,554 less in 1906 than in the year
1900. According to Sir George White this
ought to have found employment for 1,300,000
more workers. But was this the case ? The
Board of Trade Returns show that there
was more unemployment when the drink
bill was lower than when it was higher.
And there is this further very im-
portant fact, a fact which goes down to the
very root of the question, that though there

104

had been an increase of unemployment, there
had been a vast increase in the volume of
wealth produced. To put these facts clearly
we will present them in the form of a table :

Total Total

Drink Percentage ui~SL of Income,

Bill. of Unemployed. ?£&* assessed to

Income Tax.

Year. £ millions. £ millions. £ millions.

1900 .. 185 .. 2*9 .. 877 .. 833
1906 .. 166 .. 4*1 .. 1068 .. 925

Here are some facts for those to explain
who maintain that the transfer of expendi-
ture from drink to other articles will solve
the unemployed problem and abolish
poverty. Contemporary with a great reduction
in the expenditure upon drink, unemploy-
ment has increased, wages have declined,
wealth has grown, and the profits of the
rich have risen. The explanation is that
there are economic forces at work deter-
mining the conditions of labour and the
distribution of wealth, which the Prohibi-
tionists ignore. It may be true that to pro-
duce goods of the same selling value, more
labour is employed in manufacturing cloth-
ing, furniture, and in mining, agriculture,
etc., but in all these trades the number of
persons employed in proportion to the out-
put is every year getting smaller. Here are
a few facts : —

The Cotton Trade.

Number of

Year.

Raw cotton used,

Persons

Lbs.

employed.

I88l

M7I»357,77<5

586,470

1895

1,553.758,080

538,883

I904

1,701,215,488

523,030

105

In twenty-three years there has been an in-
crease of about 15 per cent, in the volume
of the raw cotton worked in this country,
and a decrease of about 11 per cent, in
the number of persons employed. If this
tendency goes on, and it certainly must
with the advance of improvements, it must
follow that an increase of demand for such
goods will not provide additional employ-
ment. The same tendency is to be seen
operating in every one of our staple indus-
tries. It is not true, therefore, that . total
abstinence can provide work for all ; the
causes of unemployment are clearly economic.
There is this further point worth mentioning,
that total abstinence would improve the
efficiency of the workers, and, therefore, a
smaller number would be able to turn out
the same volume of production.

The contention that the transfer of pur-
chasing power would find much more em-
ployment deserves consideration from another
point of view. The contention is put forward
by Sir George White in the article already
mentioned. He says : —

The drink trade has a gigantic capital, makes very
large profits, and has an extremely small wages fund ;
therefore, money spent in it is, from the workers' stand-
point, absolutely wasted. The year's turnover of
a large brewer is twenty times the amount of his yearly
wages account ; whilst the ordinary manufacturer
will pay to his wage-earners a year's turnover in three
and a half to four years. A Scotch Whiskey firm,
making an average profit of £120,000 yearly, pays £600
a week (£31,200 a year) in wages, but ten times the
amount, viz., £6,000 weekly would be paid in wages

io6

to make such a profit in most of the manufacturing
industries of the country.

The fallacies in this statement are two :
first, that the wages paid in the distillery
represent the employment given in making
the whiskey produced in this distillery ;
second, that the profits do not provide em-
ployment. The distillery process is only
one operation in the work required to get
whiskey from the barley stage to the bar
counter. The drink traffic employs the great-
est portion of its labour in other functions
than the actual production of the drink in
the distillery or brewery. The census returns
give only some 56,000 persons as being em-
ployed as maltsters, brewers, and distillers,
but the number of persons employed in the
liquor traffic (with their dependents) is put
down variously at from 1,225,000 to 1,966,000.
In the Daily News, August 30th, 1904,
Mr. G. B. Wilson went into this question
minutely with the object of disproving the
statements made by the trade as to the extent
to which it gives employment. As a matter
of interest we will summarise his conclusions
and compare them with the trade figures : —

Trade Figures. Mr. Wilson's

Makers .. .. 213,000 .. 97, 540

Distributors . . 775,000 . . 325,912

Dependents .. 900,000 .. 653,331

Agriculturalists .. 78,000 .. 150,000

Persons employed .. 1,966,000 1,226,783

The liquor traffic is not the only trade
which makes a big profit in proportion to

107
its wages bill. Take the railways of this
country. This is not a productive business.
It gives nothing in return for its receipts
but service. Yet we find in 1906 the following : —

Total Receipts 117,227,931

Working Expenses (including Wages) . . 72,781,854

Profits 44,446,077

The item of wages is not given separately,
but it can be ascertained by analysis that it
does not amount to a sum equal to that dis-
tributed in profits. A more remarkable in-
stance of enormous profits made by a small
wages fund is that of the Coats' Sewing Cotton
Syndicate. The profits of the firm amount
to £3,000,000 a year and the wages bill does
not exceed £500,000. It would be easy to
multiply illustrations by the hundred to show
that in many of the industries making the
necessaries of life the proportion of wages to
profits is very small.

But in the extract given above it is assumed
that the profits of the drink trade employ
no labour. The profits are spent in em-
ploying labour to produce food, clothing,
houses, luxuries for the people who live in
idleness out of the drink traffic. It comes
back in wages, one way or another; but,
and this is the social waste of it all, it employs
the workers to keep others doing nothing,
who pay the wages out of profits they have
taken from other workers' labour.
The argument then that the drink traffic

io8
employs a much smaller number of persons
in proportion to the turn-over is losing its
force every year. It was practically
abandoned by Mr. James Whyte, the Secre-
tary of the Alliance, in an article in the
Commonwealth for August, 1896. " I
believe," he said, " that the liquor trade
gives much more employment than Dr.
Burns and Mr. Hoyle were disposed to
allow. In this I by no means stand alone
among temperance men."

The economic argument against expendi-
ture upon drink is that such expenditure is
unnecessary ; it does not support life or give
efficiency. The profits of the trade enable
a class to live on the labour of the workers,
without rendering any social service in
return — just as do the profits of landlords
and capitalists. Economically, the drink
traffic is analogous to other expenditure on
luxuries, but as it is indulged in to such a
great extent by the working-classes, who
can only afford luxuries by sacrificing neces-
saries, it is especially harmful. The spending
of any part of a workman's income on drink
aggravates his poverty, though it is not the
cause of his poverty. Abstinence on the
part of the workers would not of itself im-
prove their economic condition, for it would
not touch the power of the landlord and
capitalist to appropriate surplus value ; though
abstinence is desirable from every point of
view, even as a necessary condition for effective
warfare against monopoly.

iog

Chapter XI.
State Prohibition.

For more than four hundred years legislators
have been trying to make men sober by Act
of Parliament. It is true that for a consider-
able part of that time there has been the
counteracting influence of a material interest
felt by one of the departments of the state
in the prosperity of the drink traffic. The
Chancellor of the Exchequer has depended
upon the intemperance of the nation to en-
able him to make both ends meet.

All the restrictive and regulative legislation
has failed to lessen the volume of the drink
traffic. It must not be assumed that this
legislation has been useless. It would baffle
the most imaginative mind to conceive what
the state of things would have been if the
liquor traffic had been free to carry on its
trade without licensing and restriction. But,
notwithstanding this restraining influence
for good, it must be admitted that legislation
has so far failed to effect sobriety. The
question therefore now arises : Is it im-
possible for legislation to prevent drunkenness ;
or are there some, as yet, untried legislative
powers which would achieve that desirable
end?

In 1853 the United Kingdom Alliance
was formed. " The history and results of all
past legislation in regard to the liquor traffic
abundantly prove," says its Declaration of
Principles, " that it is impossible satisfac-
torily to limit or regulate a system so essen-
tially mischievous in its tendencies " ; there-
fore, " all good citizens should combine to
procure an enactment prohibiting the sale of
intoxicating beverages, as affording most
efficient aid in removing the appalling evil of
intemperance."

On the 10th March, 1864, the late Sir
Wilfrid Lawson moved for leave to bring in
a Permissive Prohibitory Intoxicating Liquors
Bill, the object of which was to give the
ratepayers of localities permission to prohibit
the common sale of intoxicating liquors in
their own districts. The motion for leave
to bring in the Bill was opposed, but was
carried by 72 votes against 38. Five years
later the Bill reached Second Reading, when
it was defeated by 195 to 89. On seven
subsequent occasions (the last being in 1878)
the Bill was rejected by overwhelming majori-
ties. The election of 1880 very much altered
the constitution of the House of Commons,
and on the 18th of June of that year a Resold
tion in favour of Local Option was carried
by 231 votes to 205.

Since that time Local Option has taken its
place as a recognised proposal of temperance

reform. In 1895, Sir William Harcourt on
behalf of the Liberal Government of that
time introduced the Intoxicating Liquors
Local Control Bill. It granted to the people
of localities power to veto, by a two-thirds
majority, the sale of intoxicating liquors,
except in regard to railway refreshment
rooms, hotels, and eating houses. Two other
options were permitted — (1) to reduce, by a
simple majority, the number of licenses by
one-fourth ; (2) by a simple majority to pre-
vent the sale of drink on Sundays. This
Bill never reached a Second Reading. The
Government were defeated on the War Office
Vote, and a General Election followed, with
disastrous consequences to the Liberal Party.
The unpopularity of the Local Option Bill
was very commonly assigned as one of the
chief reasons for the defeat of the Liberals
at the polls. If this were true, it has an im-
portant bearing upon the wisdom of devot-
ing great efforts to securing the enactment
of such a law ; for its success in practice must
depend upon the degree of public opinion in
favour of restricting the number of licenses.

It is impossible to estimate the measure
of influence exerted by particular questions
at a General Election when so many issues
are before the country. It is more likely
that the widespread disappointment with the
Liberal Government's record of social and
labour legislation had more to do with their

112

' defeat than the Local Option Bill.

The Right Hon. Herbert Gladstone, Chief
Liberal Whip, speaking at Manchester, Nov.
24th, 1897, said : —

The heaviest burden the Liberal Party had to bear
at the last General Election, with perhaps the exception
of Home Rule, was that of direct veto. He said
that after consultation with scores of his colleagues in
the House of Commons.

The new Parliament elected in January,
1906, was soon given an opportunity of ex-
pressing its views on Local Option. On April
10th, 1906, the following Resolution was moved
by Mr. Leif Jones : —

That this House notes with satisfaction the suc-
cessful working of the local option laws in the colonies,
and approves the principle on which these laws are
based, namely, that the people ought to possess, through
a vote of the local electors, the power to protect them-
selves against the admitted evils of the Liquor Traffic.

This resolution was carried by 273 votes to
46, most of the members of the Government
voting in favour.

The position attained by Local Option in
the temperance reform programme demands
that the question should receive consider-
ation in these pages. It is scarcely worth
while to discuss Prohibition by the State,
or the power of veto over a large area, be-
cause, while the extreme temperance party
still hold to " Prohibition by the State " as
an ideal, they have never put such a proposal
into the form of a Parliamentary demand,
resolution, or bill.

"3

The United States of ^America has been
for nearly a century a fruitful field of ex-
periments in the control of the liquor traffic.
Since 1851, when the State of Maine
adopted Prohibition, it is scarcely an ex-
aggeration to say that every State in the
Union has been kept in a condition of fer-
ment on the liquor question. The advantage
has alternated between the two parties. A
strong pull and a long pull has at intervals
given the temperance party a temporary
victory, but the effort has generally left them
too exhausted to keep the advantage they
had won. The Prohibition sentiment was
too weak to act unconsciously, and after a
short, but usually disastrous experience, the
prohibitory law has been repealed. During
the past three years the States have enacted
164 separate laws directly affecting the liquor
traffic.*

At one time or another 17 States have had
stringent Prohibition laws. Fourteen of these
have abandoned Prohibition as impracticable.
In 1907 a great wave of temperance agitation
passed over the United States. It was a
convulsion analogous to the religious revivals
which sometimes come — and go. Under the
influence of this wave of sentiment two small
States, Oklahoma and Alabama, enacted Pro-
hibition in 1907, while in a third State, Georgia,
Prohibition came as a result of the Atlanta

* Foreign Office Paper, Cd. 3284, p. 105.
H

H4
riots, the white populations deciding to close
the saloons for se]f -protection against the
drunken negro mobs.

The Rev. W. J. Dawson, in an article re-
cently published,t says " Six great States —
viz., Maine, Kansas, North Dakota, Georgia,
Alabama, and Oklahoma have enacted Pro-
hibition laws. In not one of these States

IS IT POSSIBLE TO SELL OR PROCURE ALCOHOLIC

liquor." This extract is quoted as a typical
specimen of the reckless and unfounded
statements made by fanatical and emotional
would-be temperance reformers. Such state-
ments contribute nothing useful to the dis-
cussion of a great and difficult problem, but
serve only to condemn as absolutely untrust-
worthy the advocates of this particular proposal.
Not one of the States mentioned is a great
State. Georgia is the most highly populated,
and 83 per cent, of its people live in villages
of less than one thousand inhabitants. In this
" great " State at the census of 1890 the average
number of persons per square mile was 31,
while the average density in this country is
over 500. Oklahoma is a practically un-
inhabited prairie, having only just recently
been raised to the dignity of a State. North
Dakota is very similar, the density of the
population being four persons per square mile.
Kansas, Maine and Alabama are all thinly
populated States. The fourteen States which

•f Christian World, Jan. 2nd, 1908.

H5
have tried and abandoned Prohibition were
mainly the populous States of the Union. The
two States which have most recently repealed
their Prohibition laws are Vermont and New
Hampshire, and these were the most populous
of the then existing Prohibition States,
though their density was not one-twelfth
that of this country. Vermont had been
under Prohibition since 1852, when the
majority for Prohibition was 13,000 votes.
It is significant of much that two generations
born and reared under Prohibition should in
1902 repeal the statute and give power to the
towns to adopt a license system. The case of
New Hampshire is very similar. The State
is mainly agricultural, and only the votes of
the isolated farmers had succeeded in pre-
venting the repeal of the Prohibition law
long years ago. In 1903 there voted for licenses
34,330 ; against licenses 26,630. A majority
of the village units voted for " no license ";
at one place (Waterville) only one elector
turned up, and he unanimously carried the
cause of Prohibition.

The statement is made in the quotation
from Dr. Dawson's article that "in not
one of these (Prohibition) States is it possible
to sell or procure liquor." Opinions differ
widely as to the actual measures of success
attending Prohibition, but the bold assertion
that " in not one of these States is it possible
to sell or procure liquor/ ' will find little sup-
port even among the strongest Prohibitionists.

n6

There are not two more extreme Pro-
hibitionists in this country than Mr. Joseph
Malins and Mr. Guy Hayler, a North of
England temperance agent. Both these men
have personally investigated the working of
Prohibition in America, and both are wit-
nesses strongly biassed in its favour. Mr.
Malins says, " In some places the Prohibi-
tion law is grossly violated."* Mr. Guy
Hayler,f describing the state of things in
Portland, Maine, quotes from one issue of the
leading daily paper of that town several in-
stances of raids upon liquor sellers, " just
as in the days of Sheriff Pearson and his
predecessors."

An official verdict as to the success of Pro-
hibition is given in the Foreign Office Report
recently issued, and from which quotations
have already been given. Referring to Kansas,
this Report quotes from the Message of
Governor Hoch to the State Legislature,
1905:

In three or four of the large cities of Kansas, Pro-
hibition has never been thoroughly enforced, and dur-
ing recent years this number has been increased till
it now probably amounts to some 25.

In these towns a system of monthly fines usually
prevails, which amounts practically to a license sys-
tem. Sometimes the dealer is formally arrested,
pleads guilty, and is fined anything from 50 to 100
dollars, according to the amount usual in the place.
Sometimes the police officer, without actually taking

* A Journey Round the Globe, page 7.
t Northern Echo, April 20th, 1904.

H7
the offender to the police station, releases him on re-
ceiving a cash bond for his appearance. The dealer
fails to appear when the case is called, and the bond is
forfeited. In either case the dealer may look forward
to being left unmolested in his business till the succeed-
ing month.

In the larger cities the saloon has become a recog-
nised and permanent institution. In the smaller,
virtual local option prevails ; Prohibition is the law,
but its enforcement is in the hands of local elected
officials.

Mr. Vice-Consul Keating, of Maine, re-
porting on the enforcement of Prohibition in
Portland, states that for two or three years
previous to 1905 the Sheriff had organised
a system of restricted saloons where the sale
of liquor was well known to the public and
the officials. The Sheriff himself, a total
abstainer, had recognised his inability to
suppress the liquor traffic, and had adopted
this method as the lesser of two evils. In
1905, one of the periodic outbursts of pro-
hibitory enthusiasm came, and the saloons
and bars were closed. The Vice-Consul
reports that the result has been to throw
the liquor traffic into the hands of pocket
pedlars.

Prohibition, while it certainly restricts the sale
of liquor, certainly does not suppress it. While the
poor, improvident, or stranger, is compelled to seek
the pocket pedlar, the average non-abstainer can get
rather more than he wants at the numerous clubs or
else at his or his friend's home ; and if his wants are
running low, a telephone order to a dealer in the neigh-
bouring State will soon replenish his stock by the next
train or express.

u8
This extract sums up fairly well what
is the generally accepted conclusion among
impartial persons as to the results of State
Prohibition in America. Where there is a
sparse and widely scattered population it is
possible to enforce a prohibitory law over the
whole State. But a considerable part of
the population in the villages and towns is
always in revolt against the Prohibition. No
law can be enforced against a strong public
sentiment. The violation of such a law, like
passive resistance and anti-vaccination in this
country, is not regarded as criminal. The
effect, however, of open violation is very
serious upon the public respect for law, and
it brings the Government and administration
into general contempt. Experiments in
State Prohibition, under far more favour-
able conditions than obtain in Britain, offer
no encouragement to this country to attempt
a policy of State repression enforced by police
law.

119

Chapter XII.
Local Option.

The case of Local Option differs from State
Prohibition. Most of the American States
which have repealed their State prohibitory
law have adopted systems of Local Option.
Local Option is very generally the law in
Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Before
proceeding to consider the results of Local
Option in other lands it might be well to
discuss the abstract arguments for and against
the principle itself.

It is accepted as a settled principle that the
community has a right to interfere with a
private trade, when the way in which it is
carried on is injurious to the persons em-
ployed in it, or to the public. It is undeni-
able that the drink traffic increases poverty,
crime, and lunacy. The community has to pay
the cost of dealing with the effects of drunken-
ness. The contention that the drinkers
contribute to the revenue a sum equal to the
cost of maintaining the poor and administer-
ing justice does not affect the point. The
taxation upon liquor is not imposed to meet
the expenses of dealing with the damage it
does, any more than the tax upon tea is to
pay for curing the indigestion it may cause.

f*J : * I20

The licensing powers of the magistrates
admit the right of the community to regu-
late, to restrict, and even to prohibit the
sale of liquor. The magistrates act as the
representatives of the people, and in theory
are supposed to express the will of the people
in licensing matters. To transfer the magis-
trates' power directly to the votes of the
people is the assertion of no new claim by the
community ; it is simply a change in the
method of exercising a right ; it is a change
from representative to democratic local govern-
ment.

Local Option claims the advantage of
being adaptable to local conditions, and of
providing a means of reducing the number
of public houses with the growth of temper-
ance sentiment in a district. The people of
the locality are better judges of their own
needs and wishes than a bench of magis-
strates exercising a wide jurisdiction. Local
Option can only prohibit the traffic within the
district in which a large majority of the electors
have expressed their desire to that effect, and
therefore it will be enforced with the authority
of a strong public opinion, — the best guarantee
of success.

Opponents of Local Option urge that to
give the power to a majority to prohibit the
sale of intoxicating liquor is a tyrannical
interference with individual liberty. The
answer to that is that such an objection
might have some weight as an argument

121

against total State Prohibition, but it cannot '
tell against Local Option. Local Option is
not the prohibition of the use of liquor. Its
utmost power does not extend beyond pro-
hibiting the sale in public houses within speci-
fied areas. Local Option would not " rob a
poor man of his beer." The most it could do
would be to put him to a little more trouble
to get it. Local Option is simply giving the
power to the people to say whether a public
house should be licensed in a certain place, or
what number of such places shall exist, or
whether new licenses shall be granted. The
removal of the temptation of the open door
of the public house is of greater importance
than some little increase of inconvenience
to the man who is determined to get drink.
The nuisance of a public house in a district
where the great majority don't want it, is
surely a greater interference with individual
comfort than to put a small minority to some
little inconvenience by removing it.

The abstract justice of conferring the
power of Local Option upon the people is
unanswerable. The case against Local
Option is rather a practical than an abstract
one. If Local Option be put forward as a
complete legislative scheme of temperance
reform, then much can be said against
building one's hopes upon its success. The
most urgent reform in connection with the
drink traffic is to lessen the amount of drink-
ing in the poor and densely populated parts
of our towns. Local Option has little hope

to offer of doing this. As it would require
a two-thirds majority of the electors to veto
the traffic, it seems to follow that it would be
only where a strong temperance sentiment
existed that the public houses would be
closed. Local Veto is a proposal for vetoing
the traffic where little or no traffic exists. It
could not apply where most needed, and
Local Vetoists have no proposals for dealing
with the traffic where the people refuse to
veto it.

It is maintained in some quarters that the
drink-sodden people in the slums would use
the power of veto to remove the thing that
curses them. Such optimism is admirable,
but it is very unsubstantial. The plebiscites
which have been taken at times by the Tem-
perance party, and which have shown such
great majorities for Local Option are value-
less. There is all the difference, as every
member of Parliament well knows, between
voting for an abstract resolution and a con-
crete proposal. Local Veto in the abstract
is fascinating, but when it becomes a ques-
tion of voting to close the business of a friend
or lifelong acquaintance the matter assumes
a very different appearance. It may be
fascinating to indulge in prophecy as to how
far Local Option would be applied in this
country, but the conclusions would be only
matters of opinion. We are, however, justi-
fied in judging of probabilities by the experience
of Local Option in other lands.

In investigating the results of Prohibition

123
and Local Option abroad one striking fact
everywhere manifests itself. Whatever
measure of success has been attained by a
suppressive policy has been in thinly popu-
lated country districts. Such a policy has
invariably broken down when it has been
applied to large centres of population. The
late Secretary of the United Kingdom Alli-
ance, Mr. James Whyte, states,* — and to
emphasise the fact he prints the words in
italics,

Up to date there is no large town — I think I may
say in the world — in which the liquor traffic has been
dealt with satisfactorily by any method whatever.

The drink question in our country resolves
itself into grappling with the traffic as a town
problem. Therefore, if evidence can be pro-
duced that Local Option has been successful
over wide afeas, and among a large popula-
tion in the aggregate, that would be no evidence
that a similar result would follow in this
densely populated country. Even if it were
possible to show that Local Option is in success-
ful operation in large towns in other countries,
that would not be conclusive proof that such
a policy would be successful here. Other
circumstances have to be considered. The
strength of the temperance sentiment, the
religious character of the people, racial pecu-
liarities, climatic and industrial conditions,
might in other countries aid its success —
influences and conditions which may be
absent here.

* " The Alliance Vindicated/' p. 52.

124
No temperance reform will be of service
in this country which is not effective in towns.
The temperance agitation arose with the
growth of the modern towns. The concen-
tration of the population brought new prob-
lems ; problems of public health arose which
necessitated new forms of town government.
There is a greater difficulty of dealing with
an evil among a congested population ; in
the country districts there is greater fear of
law. The main cause of drinking operates
far more vigorously in towns than in the rural
districts.

LOCAL OPTION IN THE UNITED STATES.

It has been pointed out that four-fifths of
the American States which at one time tried
Prohibition have abandoned it. It failed
because of the difficulty of enforcing it in the
towns. And these " towns and cities " are
mostly small country villages. Yet it was
found impossible to keep these small centres
of population " dry." So the wise policy
was followed of leaving the matter to the
decision of the localities. The result is that
almost universally the country districts vote
for Prohibition ; but where two or three are
gathered together the public house must be
in the midst of them. The results of Local
Option in America are sympathetically, but
critically, summed up in the following ex-
tract* :

* Foreign Office Report, Cd. 3284-1, April 1907,
p. 107.

I2 5

If the aim of liquor legislation is to bring about
a diminution of drinking, it may be said that Local
Option, of all the systems in force, effects real Pro-
hibition over the largest possible area with the least
possible friction. It is almost invariably found that
the towns vote for license, and the country districts
Prohibition. ... It may be pointed out in this con-
nection that the three States which retain Prohibition are
almost entirely agricultural communities. As for the
causes of the distinction, it is probable that temper-
ance feeling is stronger in the rural districts ; but it
must not be forgotten that almost everywhere in the
United States the population is sparse compared with
the United Kingdom, distances are greater, and country
police anything but omnipresent.

The Temperance Party claim that 30,000,000
of the population of the United States are
living under the operation of Prohibition.
If this be so, and if Local Option is at all
effective in reducing drinking in the areas
of its operation, then the license districts
must be terribly drunken, for the Drink
Bill of the country in 1904 was £255,545,400.
The expenditure upon drink is increasing
annually, as the following figures show : —
United States Expenditure on Drink.

Year. Dollars.

1899 .. 973.5 8 9.o8o

1900 .. I.059.5 6 3.787

1901 .. 1,094,644,155

1902 .. 1,172,565,235

1903 .. 1,242,943,118

1904 .. 1,277,727,190

Clearly, Local Option in the United States
has not dealt with the problem of the drink
traffic in the towns.

126

LOCAL OPTION IN CANADA.

The experience of Canada points to the same
conclusions. There is no other part of the
world where temperance sentiment is so strong
and widespread. The consumption of liquor
per head is but one-fifth of the consumption
in the United Kingdom. The colony has a
Dominion Local Option Law — known as the
Scott Act — as well as Provincial Local Option
laws. The Scott Act, which was hailed as
the precursor of national salvation, was at one
time in force in a number of towns and country
areas. In most of these it has been abandoned
owing to the opposition of the towns. The
operation of Local Option is widespread under
provincial law, but the difficulty experienced
in the United States of securing the vote of
the towns has been met with here also. It
might be noted that the majority required
for " no license " in the Provincial Acts is
usually three-fifths ; but the Temperance
party, finding an increased difficulty in get-
ting this majority, are now agitating for an
alteration of the Provincial Local Option
laws so that a majority of one may carry
Local Veto.

Though plebiscites and votes have shown
large majorities in favour of Prohibition,
and though Local Prohibition by the vote of
the province is widespread, neither the Tem-
perance sentiment nor the operation of Local
Veto appears to have done anything to lessen
drunkenness in the Dominion. In recent
years there has been a startling increase in

127

drunkenness and crime in Canada. In 1903

the total convictions for all offences in

Canada was 50,404, whereas the average for

the five preceding years was 40,851. The

convictions for drunkenness for 1903

totalled 16,532, the average for the years

1898-1902 being 12,123. These increases

might be accounted for by the increase in

population, but another set of facts prove

conclusively that the consumption of drink

per head is on the increase. The following

figures tell the tale : —

Production and Consumption of Wine, Beer,
and Spirits in Canada.

Imperial gallons per head of Population.
Year. Wine. Beer. Spirits.

1895 . . 0*09 . . 3*4 . . 0*69

1905 .. o-io .. 5-4 .. 0*94

In the same period in the United Kingdom,
without Local Option, the reduction in the
consumption of liquor has been as follows : —

Consumption per Head in United Kingdom.

Year. Wine. Beer. Spirits.

1895 .. 0-37 .. 29*6 .. I'OO

1905 . . 0-27 . . 277 . . 0*91

We do not argue from these startling
figures that Local Veto increases the con-
sumption of liquor, and that the absence of
the power tends to sobriety ; but the figures
do prove conclusively that there are factors
in the drink question which restrictive legis-
lation cannot touch in the least.

The strenuous effort of the Canadian Tem-
perance Party, under national conditions
very favourable to the success of legislative

128

restriction of the traffic, have failed to make
an impression upon the consumption of drink.
Clearly the experience of Canada gives little
encouragement to hope that in our country
the power of Local Option would be exercised
in such a way as to lessen the amount of drink-
ing and drunkenness.

LOCAL OPTION IN NEW ZEALAND.

The Temperance Party in this country
point to New Zealand for confirmation of
their claim that Local Option is a practical
way of dealing with the liquor question. But
the conditions are so different as between the
two countries that comparisons are of little
value. The area of New Zealand is 110,000
square miles, — more than that of Great Britain ;
the population of the whole country is less
than Glasgow and district. The country is
mainly pastoral, there are no great towns,
industrial and social legislation is very
advanced. The conditions are healthy ; the
population is selected ; everything is favour-
able to sobriety. The Temperance Move-
ment, which is prohibitory in its aims, is
extremely active and its agencies are in-
numerable.

In the year 1894 a Local Option law was
enacted. It requires a three-fifths majority
of the voters who poll to carry " no license "
in any electoral district. Polls are taken
every three years, and the results have been
as follows : —

129

For

For

For no

Year.

Continuance.

Reduction.

License.

1896

.. I39,58o •

94,555 •

98,312

1899

. . I43»962

. 109,449

120,542

1902

. . 148,449

132,240

. 132,240

I905

182,884

. 151,057 .

. 198,768

In 1905, in 36 out of 68 licensing districts
a majority of the votes polled was for no-
license, but not in sufficient number to make
up the three-fifths required to carry the issue.
In three districts where no-license was carried
in 1902 the position was kept, and in three
other districts the necessary majority for
no-license was secured. In the four cities —
Auckland, Dunedin, Christchurch and Welling-
ton — about one-third of the voters were
given for no-license. It will be seen that the
percentage of voters supporting reduction
and " no-license " has shown a continuous
advance. At the first election only one
district — Clutha — gave a majority for " no-
license," and this district remained in splendid
isolation until 1902, when five other districts
secured the necessary three-fifths majority.
In two of these cases the vote was afterwards
declared to be invalid.

Ten years of Local Option in New Zealand
has apparently done nothing whatever to
lessen the amount of drink consumption.
In six districts only has the law been put
into operation to the extent of Local Pro-
hibition, and meanwhile, nationally, the
consumption of drink has increased, and the
number of convictions for drunkenness has

130
increased also. The following figures taken
from official publications are instructive : —
Convictions for Drunkenness in New Zealand.*

Year.
1899

Per 1,000 population
(excluding Maories)

8-26

19OO

9'50

1901

10-32

1902

10-34

1903

10*70

1904

11*32

1905

10-03

The convictions for drunkenness among the
native-born population (who constitute 51*85
of the total over 15 years of age) are only 17
per cent, of the whole number.

Since the passing of the Local Option
Law the consumption of alcoholic liquors has
greatly increased.

Consumption of Beer and Spirits in
New Zealand.
1. — Beer.

Year. Total Gals. Per head of Pop.

1894 .. 5.oi9»973 .. 7*4 gals.

1900 . . 6,966,908 . . 9*1 „

1905 . . 8,014,430 . . 9*2 „

2. — Spirits .

Year. Total Gals. Per head.

1894 .. 439,153 •• 0*65 gals.

1900 .. 549,932 .. 0*52 „

1905 .. 634,827 .. 073 „

It is only fair to add that since 1901 the
consumption of drink per head has shown
no tendency to increase. On the contrary,
however, there has been a striking increase
in crime since 1897, the number of distinct

* New Zealand Year Book,

I3i
persons committed to prisons having risen
from 25-84 per 1,000 of population to 34*27
in 1904.

The Drink Bill of New Zealand for 1903
was £3,056,590, being £3 10s. yd. per head of
the population, and for 1904, £3,152,849 and
£3 10s. iod. respectively.

In the face of all these facts we fail to find
much encouragement to hope that Local
Option will do much to lessen the volume of
the drink trade in the United Kingdom. In
reviewing the operation of Local Option in
New Zealand it should be remembered that
there is the women's vote to take into con-
sideration. At the poll of 1905 the women
voters formed 44 per cent, of the total, and
it is believed that the increasing vote for " no-
license " is accounted for by the growing
interest of the women in public affairs. Com-
pared with the polling in the year 1902, the
total number of votes shows a numerical in-
crease of 41,380, or 22-95 per cent, on the
part of the men, and 36,178, or 26*11 per cent,
on the part of the women, clearly showing
that the latter are now taking greater interest
in Local Option matters than they formerly did.

The experience of Canada and of New
Zealand is repeated in our Australian Colonies.
All the States have Local Option laws, some
enacted so long ago as 1885, but they have
not been put into operation to any extent.
The right to veto the issue of new licenses
has been very extensively exercised,

132

but in extremely few cases has " no license "
been carried ; and there seems to be a fairly
unanimous opinion that in these few in-
stances the experiment has been a failure.
Sir George Turner, an ex-Premier of Victoria,
informed an interviewer* that " in Mildura,
a portion of the colony of Victoria, which
has Prohibition, he believes that more drink
is consumed than in any other place in that
colony. In his opinion there is no surer
way of making the people take to liquor than
to close all the hotels and make the traffic
illegal."

The Bishop of Ballarat, speaking at the
Royal Colonial Institute in 1897, said : —

I think a mistake was made in attempting to make
Mildura " prohibitionist." This may suit some places,
but I can say from personal knowledge that at Mil-
dura the result has been disastrous. It lowered the
moral tone of the community, for it generated on a
large scale bogus clubs and sly grog shops, which
under the circumstances, people came to use without
a sense of degradation.

The number of police cases connected with drink I
found painfully large in the settlement.

Although practically nothing has been done
in Australia to prohibit the sale of drink,
there has been in all the States a tendency
to a diminished consumption of liquor. Under
each of the heads of wine, beer, and spirits,
the consumption per head of population in
1905 was lower than in 1891.

It may be remembered that we laid it down
that proof of the success of a form of legis-
* Bradford Observer, June 12th, 1896.

133
lative control in one country did not justify
the conclusion that the same policy would
achieve success elsewhere. Our review of
the operation and results of Prohibition and
Local Option in the United States, Canada,
New Zealand and Australia has not shown a
measure of success which would justify us in
hoping that much would come from Local
Option in the United Kingdom, even if the
conditions here were as favourable as in the
other countries mentioned. But the condi-
tions in Great Britain are far less favourable
than in any of the countries where Local
Option is the law, and therefore the difficulties
in the way of its success here will be greater.

It is maintained, however, that the United
Kingdom can furnish many instances of the
successful operation of Local Veto. On
August 27th, 1907, a Government return was
issued giving the number of civil parishes in
Rural Districts in England and Wales with
no"on" licenses. The totals are as follows : —

LOCAL VETO AT HOME.
England and Wales.

Number of CWil Total Popula- Number of Civil Total Populat'n

Parishes in tion of Rural Parishes in of Civil Parishes.

Rural Districts. Districts Rural Districts -vith no

(ist April, 1904) (1901; with no " On" Licenses.

"On"' Licenses.

Total 12,995 7,469,488 3,903 575» I2 9

In 3,903 civil parishes in rural England and
Wales there are no public houses. But how ,
is this an argument for local Veto ? Why
L are there no public houses in these parishes ?

134

Simply because the parishes are too thinly
populated to support public houses, and
because in practically every case there are
adjoining parishes which provide all the
facilities for getting drink which the inhabit-
ants of the " no " license areas desire.

The Temperance Party make much of the
Prohibition areas of Toxteth, Bessbrook, and
the estates of Mr. Cameron Corbett, M.P.,
near London. In these cases Prohibition
is enforced by the will of the landowner, and
such a district naturally attracts people who
are teetotallers or temperate. None of these
Prohibition residential districts present any
features which distinguish them from any
other new district with the same class of pro-
perty, in which Prohibition is not enforced.
Mr. Wm. Crossfield, J. P., in his evidence
before the Royal Commission on Liquor
Licensing Laws, referring to the " no license "
areas in Liverpool, said, " I am bound to say
that with very little trouble from the centre
of that area an unlimited quantity of refresh-
ments could be obtained," and in reply to a
question as to whether the people living in the
restricted area were in any way abstainers
more than in licensed districts, he answered,
" Oh, no ; I am sorry to say not."

The United Kingdom Alliance claim* that
the case of Bessbrook, a linen manufacturing
town of 4,000 inhabitants, is a striking
example of the blessings of Local Prohibi-

* Th$ Alliance Budget, p. 22.

135
tion. We will confine our comment to the re-
production of the following letter from the
Rector of Bessbrook, dated January 6th,
1908 : —

I can give you any information you may require
about Bessbrook. I have been rector for the past
seven and a half years, but before coming here I knew
all about it as my native place is just fourteen miles
from it. The founders of Bessbrook determined to
exclude from it the three P's ; the pawn-office, public-
house, and police barracks. The former two are still
absent, but the police barracks is here for the last ten
years. There are public-houses near it ; one at Millvale,
ten minutes walk ; multitudes in Newry, forty-five
minutes walk. The Workhouse is beside Newry. I am
one of the Chaplains. Bessbrook is, and has been ever
since I knew it, the reverse of " a teetotal Paradise."
Drunkenness is very common, and convictions at Newry
Petty Sessions are frequent. There is a fair amount of
crime. You may take it for granted that the gaols at
Armagh and Dundalk always have some Bessbrook
people in them. In saying this, I do not wish to re-
present it as being worse than any other manufacturing
town of the same size, but it is clearly no better. There
is much poverty through the idleness of many who could
work but will not, and disease is prevalent. I was in
England at the time of the General Election, and was
amused at the notion that I had come from the most
exemplary place in the British Islands."

If the Prohibition areas in Britain were
vastly superior in comfort and general well-
being to the licensed areas, this state would
be a strong testimony to the value of absti-
nence, but that fact would have no bearing
whatever on the question as to whether the
democratic power of Local Option would be
generally exercised. An interesting incident

136
bearing on this point is furnished by the case
of Port Sunlight — the model village of
Messrs. Lever Bros. In October, 1900, an
inn was opened in the village on strictly Tem-
perance lines. It was so conducted for nearly
two years, when a request was made that
alcoholic drinks should be sold. The matter
was put to a vote of the adult population
of the village, when, on a large poll, 80 per
cent, of the votes cast were in favour of alcohol
being introduced. If a people living under
such conditions as the inhabitants of Port
Sunlight do, desire to have the convenience
of a liquor shop, it seems as if there would
be little chance of carrying Local Prohibition
in less fortunately circumstanced localities.

Short of the total suppression of licenses
in a locality is the option of reducing the
number. Nothing in connection with licensing
statistics is more unsatisfactory than the
relation between the number of licenses and
the convictions for drunkenness. From these
statistics it is an easy matter to show that a
reduction in the number of licenses, to use
the words of Mr. Gladstone, "if it pretends
to the honour of a remedy is little better than
an imposture.' ' We will give one comparison,
taking two towns in every respect fairly com-
parable, namely, the two Lancashire
boroughs of Accrington and Nelson. The
towns are but twelve miles apart, fairly equal
in size, both cotton weaving centres. The
figures as to number of licenses, convictions

137
for drunkenness, etc., are as follows* : —

Convictions
On Off for

Population Licenses Licenses Clubs Drunk'nss

Accrington ..43,122 93 31 10 144

Nelson '. 34,816 15 17 16 202

Accrington —One conviction per 300 of population.

„ One license to 347 of population.

Nelson — One conviction per 162 of population.

„ One license to 1,025 of population.

Such contrasts as these might be given by
the hundred. There are many reasons which
might be suggested to account for the paradox.
The stringency of police supervision varies
in different districts. The number of unlicensed
drinking- places in the case of Nelson, cited
above, is more than the number of public
houses. In Accrington the number of clubs
is less than one-ninth the number of licensed
premises. These facts no doubt have a
bearing on the drunkenness of each pl9.ee.
The suppression of a license will not destroy
the drink appetite. It will, as we have shown,
decrease the consumption of drink by only
that amount which is consumed indifferently
because the public house offers the opportunity.
But, even this proportion of drink is not stopped
by the suppression of a license here and there
when ample facilities still remain. But those
who will have drink — and these are the very
people who require strict regulation — will
find other means, if jj their former facilities
are removed. The truth of this, and therefore

* Licensing Statistics, 1906.

I3»
the hopelessness of saving the heavy drinker
by the suppression of licenses, was very force-
fully stated by Mr. Asquith when introducing
the Licensing Bill on February 27th, 1908.
He said : —

For the past few months not a week has passed
that I have not had brought to my notice cases in
which a suppression of a license under the Act of 1902^;
has been followed almost immediately by the upgrowth
of a club, not in the same premises, but very often
next door, carrying on precisely the same business,
often tied to the same brewer, who finances the whole
affair — (cheers) — frequented by the same class of
persons, the only difference being that no license duty
was paid and that there are no restrictions as to the
hours of opening and closing. Such places are often
occupied during the whole of Sunday, sometimes in
betting and gambling, as well as drinking, and there is
no effective police supervision. That is a monstrous
evil. It is a bad thing in the interest of the community,
and it is a thoroughly unfair thing in the interests of the
trade. I can quite understand the indignation — it
seems a perfectly legitimate indignation — which is felt by
those interested in the trade when they find that they
have contributed to a compensation fund for the sup-
pression of public-houses, and yet the moment one is
suppressed a club springs up which carries on exactly
the same business. — (Cheers.)

" The mere limitation of numbers — the idol
of Parliament — if it pretends to the honour
of a remedy is little better than imposture."
Our survey of the world-wide experience of
this policy shows how true are those expres-
sive words.

139

Chapter XIII.

" Disinterested " Management.

The most sanguine supporter of Local
Option will admit that if the operation of
such a law realises all his expectations a
great volume of drinking will still remain for
treatment. Though comparatively little suc-
cess has followed past efforts at legislative or
public regulation of the traffic, it is not out-
side the bounds of reasonable hope that
some system of control could be devised
which would reduce the abuses of drinking
to a minimum. Local Option, as we have
admitted, may be of partial benefit, but
some method of control is required for the
traffic in the districts where Local Prohibi-
tion cannot be enforced. The great weak-
ness of the position of the Temperance
Party is that it has no plan for dealing with
the traffic except by Local Prohibition.
Where there is most need for something
to be done to lessen drunkenness, the Tem-
perance Party's one proposal cannot be
applied. The figures given in preceding
chapters prove in regard to the United States,
Canada, New Zealand and Australia,
that though additional areas are coming

140
under Local Prohibition, there is a more
than corresponding increase of drinking in
the non-Prohibition districts. To deal with
this is the great problem of temperance re-
form, in so far as public regulation or con-
trol of the traffic can lessen indulgence.

It is admitted that the opportunity to
some extent makes the drinker ; and when
to the opportunity is added encouragement,
we get a considerable amount of drinking,
which might be abolished if the opportunity
and the encouragement were lessened. In
order to deal with this particular phase of the
question many schemes have been tried and
proposed, some of which have failed, Some
have achieved a certain measure of success,
but none has so far established itself as a
completely satisfactory method.

But the lessons of both the failures and
of the moderate successes are valuable. In
such a great question as this, experience
must be the teacher, and we can only expect
to evolve a practical and satisfactory system
after many failures.

THE SCANDINAVIAN SYSTEMS.

In recent years public attention has been
prominently directed to what is called the
Scandinavian system. Under this system
the sale of spirits is in the hands of a com-
pany endowed with a monopoly for a par-
ticular town by the licensing authority,
which is the magistracy acting on the advice
of the Town Council and Chief of Police.

Hi

Generally speaking, in Norway and Sweden,
this company system in towns, controls
the sale of spirits, and in the country dis-
tricts Prohibition prevails. Though the prin-
ciple underlying the Swedish (or Gothenburg)
system and the Norwegian system is the same,
namely, the elimination of private profit, there
are important differences of detail in the two
systems.

We desire neither to praise not to condemn
the Scandinavian system. It was a pioneer
on a very difficult road, and it would be
surprising if all had been perfectly easy and
successful. There is a voluminous literature
dealing with the Scandinavian system, but
unfortunately nearly all of it is written in
a strongly partisan spirit. But the critic
who brings to the consideration of the sub-
ject a desire to discover, not a complete
solution of the liquor control question, but
some results which may help towards pro-
gress in that direction, will find much to help
him.

In the first half of the last century Norway
and Sweden were the most drunken
countries in Europe. Practically every

family had its spirit still. In 1855 a very
important Licensing Act was . passed for
Sweden. The domestic still became illegal,
and the power was given to the commune to
decide " not only in what manner, and within
what limits, the trade should be carried on,

142

but also whether it might take place at all
within its jurisdiction." The parish meet-
ing was to be the deciding authority as to the
issue of licenses. This power has been largely
exercised, and Local Prohibition of the sale
of spirits is the general practice throughout
rural Sweden. Eighty per cent, of the popu-
lation live outside the towns. The density
of population is very small, the average num-
ber of persons to the square mile being only
thirty for the whole country.

For years after the extensive adoption of
Local Prohibition in the country districts,
the towns remained in their former condi-
tion of drunkenness. In 1865 the system of
disposing of license by auction was super-
seded in Gothenburg by what is now known
as the Gothenburg system. The system,
briefly described, is that all licenses for the
sale of spirits in a town are handed over as
a monopoly to a company formed for the
purpose of working them. The company
is to have no financial interest beyond receiv-
ing the ordinary rate of interest (which in
Sweden is 6 per cent, and in Norway 5 per
cent.), and the profits are to be devoted to
purposes of public utility. The fundamental
idea is the elimination of the incentive of
private profit. A considerable freedom is
allowed to the companies to frame regula-
tions, but these bye-laws must be approved
by the Municipal Council. The licenses are
granted for short periods, five years in Norway,

143
and three in Sweden, except in the smaller
towns, when one year completes the
term. The governor can at any time, on
emergency, order the closing of the public
houses. At the end of the term of license
the popular vote may refuse renewal. It
should be borne in mind that the Company
system applies to the sale of spirits only.
There is practically free trade in beer and
wine, a person being able to obtain a license
for a very small sum.

There is a distinction between the methods
of distributing the profits in the two
countries. In Norway, no part of the profits
may go to the relief of the rates. In Sweden,
as a rule, the municipality receives seven-
tenths, the general government two-tenths,
and one-tenth goes to the local agricultural
society. The idea of giving some portion of
the profits to the general government and
to agriculture is to benefit the country districts
which, being themselves under Prohibition,
have to obtain their liquor from the towns.

The Company system — known as the
Samlag — became the law in Norway in 1871.
It was not until 1894 that the principle of
local control was enacted. The Act of 1894
gives to the towns (a) the option of a prohibi-
tion of the retail trade in spirits, (b) Samlag
management. The reversion to private license
is not allowed. When it is remembered
that this Act was passed after twenty-three

144

years of experience of the Samlag system,
it may be assumed that with all its
short-comings, that system was con-
sidered to be very superior to private license.
When the Act was passed in 1894
there was a Samlag in practically every
town in Norway. By the operation of Local
Option votes, 33 of these towns are now under
spirit prohibition, and 26 under the Samlag.
Seven towns which at one time were under
Prohibition have by the popular vote re-
introduced the Samlag.

The Norwegian system provides for the
distribution of profits in the following manner :

1. To the State, 65 per cent.

2. To the Municipality, in lieu of higher license
duties now abolished, 15 per cent.

3. To objects of public utility, not chargeable to
the rates, but operating as counter attractions to the
public-house, 10 per cent. ; to towns, 10 per cent. ;
and to the surrounding country districts 20 per cent.

Since the establishment of the Samlags,
about £1,400,000 have been expended under
heading (3) viz. : on " objects of public bene-
fit." For nine years past the proportion
accruing to the State has been set apart till
1910 to form the nucleus of an Old Age Pension
Fund. The fund now amounts to over
£500,000.

Having very briefly outlined the features
of the Scandinavian systems, we will now
proceed to enquire how far the systems
have succeeded in promoting temperance.
It is not claimed that all the undoubted in-

145
crease of temperance in Scandinavia is due
to the company system. There has been
carried on during the past fifty years a very
active temperance propaganda which has
educated the people to use their licensing
powers. But this alone cannot account for
the reduction in the consumption of liquor
which has changed Scandinavia from being
the most drunken to one of the most sober
countries in Europe.

The following table gives the consump-
tion of beer and spirits per head of the popula-
tion in Sweden and Norway for certain years :

SWEDEN.

Beer

Spirits

Years

Litres

Litres

1875

—

12*9

1879

—

12-5

1881

—

IO'I

1885

. —

8-4

1891

30*9

5-8

189S

35-5

6-i

1898

50*0

7'i

1902

56-6

6'9

1904

52-8

NORWAY.

6-i

1875

23-2

6-5

1880

21 'O

3 '9

1890

i8*8

3*i

1898

21*6

2*6

1902

I7'8

2-9

1905

137

2*3

The reduction in the consumption

of spirits

has been

greater in Norway and

Sweden

since 1874,

than in any other country. The

following table may be of interest : —

J

146

Consumption of Proof Spirit per Head of

Population.

Imperial Gallons.
Years
1875 1903

Sweden 3*06 . . 1 -65

Norway 1 '47 . . 07

Belgium 1*85 . . 1-19

Holland 2*05 .. 172

Germany 1 "23 . . 1 76

Austria 0*82 . . 2*64

France 0*93 .. 1*56

United Kingdom 1*36 .. 0*99

United States .. 1*30 .. 1-22

The year 1875 marks the real beginning
of the work of the Samlags in Norway. The
striking decline in the consumption of spirits
in Norway and Sweden, when compared with
the corresponding figures of other countries,
points to the operation of some influence
in the former countries which has not been
operating in the latter. The only reasonable
suggestion that can be offered is that the
system must be mainly responsible. It might
be added further that this reduction in the
consumption of spirits in Scandinavia has
been concurrent with considerable commercial
prosperity.

Figures as to arrests for drunkenness in
Scandinavia are frequently cited as proof
that more drunkenness prevails under the
company system than in Great Britain. Such
statistics are of no value. For instance, the
arrests for drunkenness in Portland, Maine,
" where not one drop of liquor can be ob-
tained " in 1898 were 42 per thousand of the

147
population, or eight times higher than in.
Cardiff. Or to give a Norwegian comparison,
Bergen, which is a Samlag town, shows
average arrests for drunkenness per iooa
population 25*5 ; whereas St avenger, which
has Spirit Prohibition, shows 34*4 of similar
arrests. Bergen, under the company system,,
has little more than half the drunkenness,
judged by arrests, of Portland under total
Prohibition. In considering the question of
arrests for drunkenness in Scandinavia
many things have to be taken into account,
but two points should be specially remem-
bered, namely, that there is no company con-
trol of the sale of beer, and that towns are-
the drinking centres for the wide Prohibition
districts all around.

Far more valuable than police statistics
on a matter of this sort is the opinion of
disinterested men who have a knowledge of
the facts from personal experience. Na
Englishman who has investigated the work-
ing of the Scandinavian systems has con-
demned them except Prohibitionists and
men connected with the liquor traffic. A
Scotch Commission visited Norway in 1906
at the request of the Scottish Temperance
Legislation Board and in its Report it
states : —

A deep impression was caused in our minds by the
emphatic declarations made by Norwegians of all
classes in favour of the Samlag system. The un-
hesitating approval of the system by Statesmen,

148
Clergymen, Physicians, Town Councillors, Police,
Press, Employers, Labour Leaders, and Working-
men, was very remarkable. But more significant
than this was the agreement among " Totallists " and
Prohibitionists that the Samlag was a powerful aid
to sobriety, inasmuch as it helped to restrain exces-
sive drinking, and thereby raised the moral standing
of every town in which it was at work. It is hardly
possible to represent by the mere written word, the
-earnestness and sincerity with which grey-headed vet-
erans in the campaign against drunkenness testified
to the power of the Samlag as a reforming agency,
and as a step towards their own ideal.

Dr. E. R. Gould, Special Commissioner
of the United States Labour Department, who
undertook an investigation into the Scandi-
navian system at the request of his Government,
came back a most enthusiastic supporter
of the system. The Chief Constable of Gothen-
burg states that the change wrought by the
system is like the change from night to day.

149

Chapter XIV.

Trust Companies in Britain.

The movement for the company control
of public houses, somewhat on the lines of
the Scandinavian method, has made some
progress in Great Britain. The number of
Trust Companies in England, Wales, and
Ireland, affiliated to the Central Association!
was (April, 1907) 33 ; and the number in
Scotland was 5, making a total of 38 Trust
Companies. The number of public houses-
under Trust management was 233, as compared
with 206 in 1906, and 33 in 1902. The com-
bined capital amounted to £527,000.

It must be admitted that the Trust in this-
country has worked under great difficulties.
The Trust has no statutory authority or
powers other than those of the ordinary
license. It has no monopoly, and it is not
in association with the local authority, nor
has it the support of a strong public sym-
pathy. The usual financial basis of the-
Trust company is the payment of a maxi-
mum dividend of 5 per cent, with provision,
for depreciation and sinking fund. Although,
the idea is supposed to be the elimination,
of private interest, the Trust offers a finan- i

150
oial temptation quite equal to that of the
average brewery share. It is doubtful if,
generally speaking, the public houses run by
the Trust are better conducted than the ordinary
"better class of public house.

The declared intention of the advocates
•of " Disinterested Management " is, as we
T have stated, to eliminate, as far as possible,
personal and private interest in the sale of
<lrink. "It is proposed to do this by author-
ising the licensing authorities to grant all
the licenses, which they have determined to
issue in a given locality, to a body of suit-
able persons who are prepared to undertake
their disinterested management under care-
fully considered statutory conditions.' ' \ The
adoption of this system, it is claimed, would
. cause all pushing of the sale of drink to
*V' -cease, and all questionable practices in con-
nection with public houses to disappear. The
perfect disinterestedness of those who have
invested their money in these Public House
Trusts is assumed with the innocence of a
most unusual faith in human nature. The
magistrates are to have power to reduce the
number of licenses, and we are assured that
the magistrates will find in the shareholders
of the Trust Public Houses earnest supporters
of every effort at curtailment and reduction.

The purpose of the advocates of Disinter-
ested Management carried out to the extent
of their desires is that after the expiration

1-

I5i
of a Time Limit all licenses shall lapse, and
that all such as it may be decided to re-
new shall be entrusted to a specially con-
stituted body of suitable persons who would
provide the capital required, upon which they
would receive a moderate rate of interest.
The first charge upon the profits, after pay-
ment of interest on capital, should be the
formation of a reserve fund equal in amount
to the capital of the managing body. The
object of forming this fund would be to
secure that if it were afterwards decided to
abolish a license, the fund would repay the
capital to the management body. It is fur-
ther claimed that as the interest upon the
reserve fund would go a long way towards
paying the 5 per cent, return on the capital,
the pecuniary interest of the company in the
sale of diink would be reduced to a mini-
mum. The profits beyond the allotment
already noted should go to the National Ex-
chequer in the first instance, and should not
in any way be used to relieve the local rates.
Other stated objects are that the Trust Houses
should be managed so that :

1. Only the best drink that can be obtained
in the open market will be sold.

2. It will not be to the interest of the man-
ager to push the sale of intoxicants; he will
receive no commission on the sale of intoxi-
cating liquors, but will be paid a fixed salary
with commission on the sale of food and non-

152

intoxicants, or a bonus for good manage-
ment.

3. The public houses will be refreshment-
houses, and not merely drinking bars. Food
and non-intoxicants will be supplied as readily
as intoxicants and during the same hours.

Such in brief is the proposal of " Disinter-
ested Management " carried out to the full
extent and intention.

The Public House Trust Companies now
working are efforts to embody the same
principles on voluntary lines, while waiting
for the legislative monopoly they desire. It
must be admitted that experiments on a
very small scale, mostly with country public
houses, are not sufficient to justify conclu-
sions as to what would be the results in
other circumstances. One Trust public house
in a town, where all the other houses are of
the ordinary sort, cannot be expected to make
a revolution. But when every allowance has
been made for the difficulties of a partial and
hampered experiment, the results of the working
of the Trust Public Houses in Great Britain
do not warrant the claim that the system
will eliminate private interest, secure dis-
interested management, and reduce drinking
to a minimum.

The Peoples' Refreshment House Associa-
tion, which has the Bishop of Chester at its
head, has sixty houses under its manage-
ment, and it has been so far successful as to

153
pay the maximum dividend of 5 per cent,
each year since 1899 ; and at the same time
none of its houses has been prosecuted. The
local Trust Companies affiliated to the Cen-
tral Public House Association, of which
there are 38 altogether, have not yet been so
successful in combining temperance and
dividends, or in securing either the one or
the other. Two-thirds of the number have
paid no dividend ; twelve cannot even make
a profit ; while a fair number of the houses
have become notorious by reason of more
or less frequent appearances of the Com-
pany's Secretary in the Police Courts for
permitting drunkenness. The sums which
any of the Trust Houses have been able to
hand over for purposes of public utility are
negligible.

The two fatal features of the Trust system
are that the incentive of personal profit is
not eliminated, and effective control is im-
possible. A dividend of 5 per cent., with a
reserve fund taken from profits, as an ade-
quate security for the capital, is a commer-
cial investment far above the average to be
found elsewhere. The directors receive fees
in addition ; in the case of the Northumberland
Trust Company, the directors' fees amounted
to £105 for the year 1906, out of business
making a profit of only £608 6s. id., and
unable to pay a full dividend. Both the
directors and shareholders have all the in-
terests of the directors and shareholders of

154
an ordinary commercial concern. The man-
agement, too, is financially interested. The
profit is made on the alcohol, and the man-
ger cannot rid himself of the feeling that
the ten per cent, profit is expected by the
company in order to pay the dividend and
the sinking fund. The very fact that there
is such generous consideration shown for
the interests of the shareholders proves that
the investors do not regard themselves as
philanthropists who have no other motive
than to promote sobriety. A satisfactory
scheme of public house management would
be one which kept a public house open to
meet a need which existed for the time being,
but looked for the profit in the decline of drink-
ing and the social benefit which would accrue
therefrom.

The claim that the Trust Companies
would support the reduction of licenses is
opposed to reason. If the licenses to be
abolished had been worked by the Trust
sufficiently long to have allowed the full in-
vested capital to accumulate in the reserve
fund, perhaps the unwillingness to surrender
the license would not be great. But even
then there would be the pecuniary interest
of the shareholders to the extent of sacrifi-
cing a certain five per cent, for the probability
of a much less remunerative investment else-
where. But where there was not a reserve
fund the motive of opposition to the abolition
of licenses would be strong. If all the retail

155
trade were under Trust Companies there
would be a body of interested shareholders
as large and as selfish as the present share-
holders in private liquor companies.

An even more serious objection to the
Trust system than that it does not eliminate J
private interest is that it cannot possibly
secure effective control and management of
the public houses. The Trust Companies
would operate over a wide area, as do the
present companies, and the shareholders
would be non-residential, and the directors
not in personal touch with the houses. As
an instance of the state of things which
would prevail universally if, after the expira-
tion of the time limit, all public houses were
put under Trust management, take the case
of the Northumberland Trust Company
which now owns seven houses in widely sep-
arated parts of the country. It has been
found impossible to supervise the houses.
There is no local supervision of the manage-
ment. The Secretary of the Trust is the
license holder, and he is summoned for the
sins of the manager of each public house.
He has been repeatedly before the magis-
trates for offences of which he had no per-
sonal knowledge. With an extension of the
number of houses under a common Trust,
the difficulty of effective control would in-
crease.

The political and municipal interests of
the Trusts would be against the public wel-

1 5 6
fare. We have already shown that the
financial stake of the shareholders would be in
opposition to a popular desire to reduce
facilities. The power of a Trust owning all
the liquor shops in a town could be concen-
trated with more effect than it is possible for
the " Trade " to be at present.

The proposal of " Disinterested Manage-
ment " of the character we have been treating
cannot be supported as either wise, desir-
able, or practicable. It is opposed to the
whole tendency of democratic government,
which is not to relegate public businesses to
private associations, however good may be
the intentions of the latter. No scheme of
control of the retail liquor shops could be
disinterested which permitted a few private
persons to make profits out of the working
of a public monopoly. There never could
be a guarantee that the companies would be
actuated by a desire to promote temperance.
Once the Trust system was universally es-
tablished it would become a huge private
interest opposed to public welfare. The
whole idea of the Trust is opposed to the
principle of public responsibility for the
treatment of the drink question. To hand
over the licenses to associations of presum-
ably public spirited temperance reformers
is an admission by the community of its own
incapacity or want of courage. The Trust
idea is wrong in its moral and its economic
basis. The reduction of drinking to the low-

157
est possible point at any given period can
only be brought about by a plan which will
recognise that some financial loss must be
borne by the community in maintaining
facilities for the satisfaction of the existing
minimum demand. As we consider this point
to be of importance, we may illustrate what
is really meant. It is not only conceivable
but highly probable that in many districts
the demand for liquor shops will be of such
dimensions as to prevent local veto being
carried, and yet the demand will not be so
large as to make the trade financially profit-
able. A community convinced of the need
of keeping the retail sale under strict control
would be wise in carrying on this non-pay-
ing trade in the way calculated to prevent
abuse, rather than neglect to meet the need,
which, if not satisfied under proper condi-
tions would resort to disastrous ways.
Nobody but the community could undertake
such a non-paying business on any consider-
able scale. The Trust certainly would not
do this. As an instance, it may be mentioned
that when the vote of the inhabitants decided
to have a liquor license at Port Sun-
light, the public house was handed over to
the Public House Trust. This Trust re-
linquished the house after some years be-
cause they could not make the interest of
4i per cent, on the capital. There is no
doubt about the convenience of the license

1 5 8
to the village and to visitors, but the Trust
does not exist to lose money to suit the
public convenience. In this case the license
was continued by Messrs. Lever Bros.,
though doing so involved a considerable
annual loss. A firm like Lever Bros., with
its interests in the place, can afford to do
this. But in practically every other place
the community only could do that ; and it
would do so, if it recognised that by so
doing it was preventing the demand from
finding satisfaction in an unregulated club,
or in some other way which would produce
results socially disastrous.

The removal of the evils of drinking is not
going to be done without some sacrifice,
and it is not to " Disinterested Management "
taking a ten per cent, profit, we must look.
The community must accept the responsi-
bility for the existence of the traffic, and it
must be prepared to face temporary financial
loss for the sake of future social gain.

159

Chapter XV.

Public Control and Municipalisation.

The Licensing Bill now (April, 1908) before
Parliament aims at two things: first, a re-
duction in the number of licensed premises,
second, the restitution to the State of the
monopoly value of the licenses. The first
object is to be secured by a systematic re-
duction of the number of licenses until the
number remaining conform to a fixed pro-
portion to population ; the second object is
to be realised by a Time Limit, at the end of
which every then existing license lapses. The
Bill, very wisely we think, lays down no
plans for the future regulation of the traffic,
leaving that for the Parliament of fourteen
years hence.

If the Bill becomes law in its present form
generally, then at the end of the Time Limit
what is to happen ? The opportunity will be
one for inaugurating a great scheme of tem-
perance and social reform such as never was
given to the nation before. Unfettered in
any way by the obligation of considering
any private or vested interests, the nation
can begin anew to regulate and control the
Liquor Traffic with all the experience of the

i6o
list four centuries of regulation to guide it.
We may take it for granted that public
opinion fourteen years hence will not be
favourable to the State Prohibition of the
liquor traffic. But it is likely that by then
the sentiment in favour of Local Option will
have grown to the extent of warranting
Parliament in giving localities the option of
voting for " license " or "no license." This
Option will no doubt be restricted by safe-
guards to protect minorities against unreason-
able tyranny. Taking it for granted that
Local Option will be conferred, and allow-
ing for the growth of temperance opinion
in the meantime through the spread of edu-
cation and social reforms, it is safe to pre-
dict that even then the use of the power
will not materially lessen the number of
licenses and the amount of the traffic which
will then exist.

The question then arises, what is to be the
method of future control ? A number of
choices will be open. The monopoly value
of the license will be the property of the
State. There will be the choice of licensing
a private individual as at present, but adding
to the cost of the license, a sum equal to the
annual value of the monopoly. There will
be the choice of recognising by law the
Trust Companies, and conferring upon them
a monopoly to work all the licenses in a
district, subject of course as in the former
case, to the monopoly value being paid to

i6i
the public. A third choice will be to confer
the monopoly to work the licenses upon the
local authority. Let us consider each of these
three possible courses.

There would be no changes in the system
of sale as we have it to-day, by the adoption
of the first course. The only difference
would be that the publican would pay a
higher license duty. It is scarcely likely that
this of itself would stimulate the publican
to increased activity, because the increase
in the license duty would only be in proportion
to his increased trade due to the lessening
of competition. But it is not the publican
only we have to consider ; an interest more
selfish and more soulless than his will operate.
The houses will still be mainly owned by the
brewers, and every successful legislative effort
to reduce the consumption of drink, and
the increase of temperance from other causes,
will stimulate the brewers to greater activity
in pushing their sales. The onerous conditions
on which the license holders have their ten-
ancies of tied houses to-day are such as to
make it difficult for the publican to make
a living except by encouraging custom by
doubtful and illegal attractions.

But it may be urged that the tied house
system could be abolished by the licensing
authority making it a condition of the
license that the house should not be owned
by a brewer. But even that, which is not
possible, would not prevent the brewer from

162

getting the publican under his control. The
system which prevails in Scotland and London,
of brewers and dealers advancing loans to
the license holders is just as effective for the
brewers' and dealers' purpose. Moreover,
if it were possible to ensure that license holders
should be quite free from financial obligations
to the brewers, the desire of the brewers
to maintain their trade and profits would
lead to other methods ; and the formation
of rings and trusts by them would place
the retailer at the mercy of a monopoly for
the supply. There is no escaping from
the conclusion that the publican will find
his profits gradually getting less, and the
incentive to push his trade will increase in
proportion as the rate of profit declines.
To continue the system of licensing private
persons, who engage in the trade to make
as much money as they can, is not calculated
to secure the best results from the point of
view of temperance reform.

The second choice is the Trust system —
but differing from the system as it is in
operation to-day in so far as it will then
work under public sanction, under statutory
regulations, and will have a monopoly in the
district it works. With these changes, we
do not think the Trust system a desirable
form of control, for reasons which have been
fully stated in a previous chapter.

We now come to the third choice, namely,
Public Control or Municipal isation.

i63

As it is intended to deal with this proposal
at some length, it is important at the outset
to indicate the limits of reform expected
from the Municipalisation of the Drink
Traffic. The proposal is not put forward as
a complete and final scheme for solving the
drink question in all its aspects. We roughly
grouped the chief causes of drinking under
three heads: (i) industrial and social con-
ditions ; (2) social customs ; (3) facilities and
the method of supply. Municipalisation is
put forward as a scheme for effecting reform
in that proportion of drinking and drunken-
ness which is due to facilities and the method
of supply. After all that is possible has been
done by reducing facilities, either by a
statutory limitation of licenses or by Local
Option, there will remain a considerable
volume of traffic which will have to be regu-
lated or managed in some way. Municipa-
lisation is the best way to control it, so as to
reduce the evils and abuses to the lowest
possible dimensions.

The proposal for municipal control did
not originate with the Socialists. Thirty-
one years ago Mr. Joseph Chamberlain put
forward such a proposal before a Committee
of the House of Lords. He submitted to
them a well-considered scheme for the Muni-
cipalisation of the Drink Traffic in Birming-
ham. He was supported by resolutions of
the City Council, the Board of Guardians,
and the local branch of the United Kingdom

164
Alliance. He so impressed the Committee
that they reported to Parliament in favour
of legislative powers being given to Birming-
ham to carry out Mr. Chamberlain's scheme.
The Committee considered that the scheme
offered the following advantages, namely,
(i) local control ; (2) reduction of public
houses ; (3) elimination of private interest
in sales ; (4) better liquor ; (5) removal of
liquor influence from elections ; (6) reduc-
tion in drunkenness ; (7) relief, directly and
indirectly, of the rates.

About the same time Mr. Chamberlain
moved the following resolution in the House
of Commons : —

That it is desirable to empower Town Councils of
Boroughs under the Municipal Corporations Acts to
acquire compulsorily on payment of fair compensation,
the existing interests in the retail sale of intoxicating
drink within their respective districts ; and, thereafter,
if they see fit, to carry on the trade for the convenience
of the inhabitants ; but so that no individual shall have
any interest in or derive any profit from the sale.

This resolution was lost by a majority of
52, among those supporting it being the
late Sir Wilfred Lawson, who in the course
of the debate had said, " Although I do not
agree with everything in this resolution,
there can be no doubt that it would, if passed,
be the most deadly blow that this generation
has seen struck at the liquor traffic as it at
present exists/ '

Mr. Chamberlain's plan was for the Cor-
poration to acquire all the existing licenses
at market value, and the profits he cal-

i6 5
culated, after allowing for reduction of con-
sumption, would, after payment of interest
on the borrowed capital, leave sufficient to
pay off the loans in ten years' time. The
reasons which Mr. Chamberlain gave for
preferring this scheme of Municipalisation
to the Gothenburg system are interesting
as bearing on the competitive claims of the
Trust system and Municipalisation. He
said :

In England, where we are beginning <U novo, I would
rather go to headquarters, and I believe that greater
security for the conduct of the business would be afforded
if it were managed by a really representative authority,
subject to public control and criticism, than if it were in
the hands of a semi-private trust, even although that
trust might be originally established on purely philan-
thropic grounds.

Municipalisation is frankly based on the
admission that the public house is a public
convenience which the public will have. It
is recognised that the trade is one which, un-
less strictly controlled, may lead to serious
evils, but if the sale of drink be conducted
under proper safeguards then it meets what
public opinion considers (whatever indi-
vidual opinion may be) a perfectly legitimate
desire. The idea of Municipalisation, then,
is to provide for the satisfaction of a reason- ^
able indulgence in drink, but to prevent the
abuse of it. The incentive of gain is the
motive of all private business. Profits
depend upon sales ; the business man is in
trade to do as much business as he can. It

1 66
is just the same with those who are in the
liquor traffic. These men are neither better
nor worse than other business men. The
brewer and publican do not deliberately en-
gage in the trade to ruin their customers.
But, unfortunately, the more drink they sell
the more ruin they spread. This incentive
of gain, this private interest in pushing the
sale of drink is the great difficulty in the way
of effectively regulating it. The customer
with the drink-appetite finds the publican's
business interest an ever present help. The
publican has not only his own interest to
promote, but he has in most cases the even
stronger pressure of the brewer behind him.
If the financial interest of the seller in the
sale of drink could be eliminated, if a
system could be established where it would
be to the interest of everybody associated
with the sale to discourage the sale, then
undoubtedly, much drinking, and practically
all drunkenness on licensed premises would
be abolished. But, as General Neale Dow
said, " We shall never settle the drink question
so long as there is money in it "; and we might
add, when the money is out of it, the whole
problem has been by no means settled.

The reasons which support municipalisa-
tion in general apply to the Municipalisation
of the Liquor Trade. The evolution of the
public regulation of this traffic has followed
the lines of the public regulation of other
requirements. The unregulated private

x6 7
control of any business produces grave evils,
and is a public danger. Probably more lives
are lost every year from an impure milk
supply than from drinking. We have
elaborate regulations to ensure a pure supply.
But the private interest of the milk trade
is opposed to the public interest, and at
this moment the farmers and dairymen are
organising an opposition to further legisla-
tive regulation. The same thing applies
to the food supply. Adulterated food and
diseased meat are sold to the public in spite
of inspectors — and all for the profit of
the dealers, not because they desire to kill
the people.

The unregulated competition of commer-
cialism, the motive of which is private profit,
was responsible for the terrible industrial
conditions of the pre-Factory legislation
days. The Public Health Acts, which aim at
ensuring sanitary conditions for tenants and
the public generally, have been necessary
because it was proved that the personal in-
terest of the property owner was against
the public welfare, and that he would permit
grossly insanitary conditions to exist for
the sake of saving his own pocket at the
cost of the health or lives of others. The
safety of public health has demanded the
State interference with private enterprise
in almost every business. It was not found
to be safe to entrust a body of shareholders
to form a water company without protect-

i68
ing the consumers by elaborate regulations.
But the conflict of interest between the
private owners of public services and the
community has shown itself not only as a
danger to public health, but in the form
of serious public inconvenience. Hence,
private monopolies like gas works, tram-
ways, railway companies, etc., are permitted
to work only under conditions and limita-
tions imposed by the State for the protec-
tion of the community. Why are those
regulations imposed ? Simply and solely be-
cause the motive of the companies is to make
profit ; and the incentive of profit leads to
the sacrifice of public convenience and the
merciless exploitation of the public.

All regulation and control of private enter-
prise, whether it has taken the form of Factory
Laws, Public Health Acts, Food Adultera-
tion Regulations, Company Law, Railway
Control or whatever other form, has
been to protect the public against private
greed, which if left unchecked would make
the most necessary public service a danger
to the community. In no respect, unless
it be in degree, does the regulation of the
Drink Traffic differ from other forms of State
regulation of private business in the public
interests.

The illustration and the appeal to pre-
cedent in support of the Municipalisation of
the Drink Traffic may be carried still further.
Regulation was the first form of State inter-

i6g
ference with private enterprise. But regu-
lation has never succeeded in preventing
abuses and in completely protecting the
public. Scarcely a session of Parliament
passes without additional Factory Acts, in-
tended to strengthen existing powers for
the protection of the workers against the
financial interest of the employer. Local
authorities every year promote Bills to
obtain more effective powers to compel
property owners to give protection to their
tenants and the public. The Board of
Trade is ever increasing its authority over
private companies, and these companies are
vigorously opposing further regulation,
because it touches their profits. But regu-
lation upon regulation never secures com-
plete protection, nor a satisfactory measure
of public convenience. So the State and
the Local Authority have gone beyond
regulation, and, recognising that the anta-
gonism of interest between the private owners
and the public was the rpot of the difficulty,
have eliminated all private financial gain by
the public acquisition of the ownership and
control of certain concerns. The need for
regulation was private profit : the reason for
public ownership was the impossibility of
mere regulation, however stringent, secur-
ing satisfaction for the public, so long as
private persons could make money out of
public requirements. This demand for the
supersession of private ownership owing to

170
the failure of regulation, continues and
grows. At this moment Royal Commissions
and Committees are sitting to enquire into
the questions of Canal and Railway Nationa-
lisation, and these demands are coming from
the commercial classes who, tired of trying
to get concessions from the companies, see
that the motive of private profit must be
eliminated from railway management before
the public interest can be the supreme con-
sideration. The Drink Traffic is completely
analogous to all these other businesses and
services which the State has had to regulate
and ultimately own and control. Every one
of the trades mentioned, if left uncontrolled,
is capable of becoming as great a public
danger as an unregulated Drink Traffic.
The argument for State or public regula-
tion and ownership of public service applies
therefore with equal force to the Drink
Traffic.

I7i

Chapter XVI.

Municipalisation (continued).

There are further points from experience
and precedent which support the proposal
to municipalise the drink traffic. The
public ownership of services has been advo-
cated on two grounds, namely, that the
particular trade was of such a character that
it should not be left to private control, and
that the trade was a monopoly. Both these
reasons support with great force the pro-
posal to municipalise the drink traffic. The
liquor trade is one which, in the interests of
the community, should not be encouraged.
Therefore it is obviously most foolish to
allow it to remain in the hands of people
who have no motive for being in the trade
except to push it for profit. The public
must provide for the satisfaction of the
demand for liquor in moderation, so long
as the people consider moderate drinking to
be a legitimate and reasonable thing.
Further, the liquor trade is largely a
monopoly, both in its productive and its
distributive departments. Figures as to the
proportion of free to tied houses are not
obtainable, but it is not probably outside the

172
facts to put down the proportion of tied
houses at 85 per cent, of the whole number.
How brewing is rapidly passing into the hands
of the big concerns may be seen from the
following figures : —

Number of Brewers " For Sale."

Years 1880 1890 1900 1906

Number .. 19040 12000 6290 5025

The argument that only such businesses
as deal in a single commodity, or those where
there is no dependence upon the whims of
fashion, are suitable for public management,
supports the municipalisation of the liquor
traffic. The drink traffic is a simple one,
in the sense that a man knows exactly what
he wants, and the publican knows exactly
what to give him, which of course is not
necessarily what the man wants. No' great
variety of liquor is required to be stocked,
and the liquor, we are told, gains virtue with
age. The liquor traffic, from every point of
view, by the test of every argument for general
municipalisation, is eminently suitable for
municipalisation.

We admit that if the Licensing Bill now
before the country becomes law, it will make
it difficult during the working of the time
limit to interfere with the operation of the
statutory reduction and the compensation
scheme. If an experiment in Municipalisa-
tion were to be tried, it would involve the
acquisition by the local authority of all the
licenses in its area. This would mean
direct financial payment to the license

173
holders. But in view of the great import-
ance of the public being in possession of all
possible experience when they are called
upon at the end of the time limit to decide
the further method of control, it would be
invaluable if in the meantime we could have
one or two enterprising and competent
local authorities try experiments in com-
plete municipal control. It would be essen-
tial that the municipality have a complete
monopoly of the retail sale in its area ; a
municipal public house, surrounded by others
in private hands, is useless for forming con-
clusions.

If a municipality desired in the meantime
to try such an experiment, Parliamentary
sanction might be given for the acquisition
of all the licenses by the commutation of the
unexpired value of the licenses. A vote of
the inhabitants would be necessary, so that
the experiment might be assured of public
support. We have not much faith, how-
ever, in Parliament permitting any inter-
ference with the time limit scheme when it
is once in operation ; and, as we have stated
already, the period of the time limit may be
very profitably employed in educating public
opinion, and getting it ready for action when
the way for democratic control is free from
all financial difficulties.

At the end of the time limit, all licenses
automatically lapse, and the extent and
method of control of the future traffic ought

174
to be determined by the people. We do not
think it would be wise for Parliament then
to impose upon every locality the obliga-
tion to municipalise the retail traffic. To
do that would be to invite disaster. In such
a matter, admittedly beset with difficulties,
it is important to move cautiously. The plan
we would suggest is that the power of option
to municipalise should be given, and this
should be operative only after a very deci-
sive vote of the inhabitants in favour. This
option would be one of many. If municipal-
isation were approved by such a strong vote
in its support, it would indicate the existence
in the locality of a temperance sentiment and
public spirit without which initial experiments
might prove unsuccessful.

Temperance reform must follow on the
lines of all real progress. The steps taken
must be (i) gradual ; (2) democratic ; (3)
moral. They must be gradual so that we do
not move more quickly than experience
justifies. They must be democratic so as
to train the people to a sense of their duty
and responsibility for social conditions.
They must be moral in the sense that the
proposed changes do not violate the popular
sense of liberty and justice.

Parliament should lay down the broad
lines on which the Municipalisation of the
Drink Traffic shall be carried out, but inside
these, it is most important that liberty to
experiment, liberty to make mistakes, liberty

175
to rectify them, should be allowed to the
locality. Above all else we want, in connec-
tion with the treatment of the Drink Traffic,
that experience which can only come from
actual test. Only experiment can prove or
disprove the theoretic arguments for and
against the proposal in the abstract, though
it is true that our experience of public con-
trol in general has an instructive bearing on
this particular question.

The constitution of the local authority
which is to manage the liquor traffic will be
a matter for serious consideration. We are
opposed to the creation of a special authority
for the purpose. If that plan was adopted
the elections would result in a contest be-
tween fanatical teetotallers and the publicans,
the former of whom would seek to discredit
municipal management in the interests of
prohibition, and the latter to secure the
same end in the interests of the " trade."
The Council is the proper authority to
undertake this work, and as its duties are
so varied, and the interests of the citizens
who elect the Councils so diverse, the
irink question would only be one lof the in-
fluences deciding the election. If it were
considered desirable, the Council might have
power to form a statutory Committee for
this purpose, with liberty to co-opt outside
persons, though this is neither democratic in
principle, nor calculated to secure that
efficiency of management which comes from

176
a sense of direct contact with the electorate.
The whole tendency of local government is
towards the unification of administration
under one body. This must, by and bye,
necessitate a considerable increase in the
number of members of the larger councils,
and the entrusting of departments of work
to the Committees without any close super-
vision by the general body. This is in no
way undesirable. On the contrary it is
likely to conduce to more effective control,
as the members of the Councils, restricted
to one or a very few departments of public
work, will be able to keep more thoroughly
in touch with the work. And their direct
responsibility to the electorate will be in no
way impaired.

The question arises as to what Councils
should have this power conferred or with-
held, and we would suggest that the idea
which should determine this, is to make the
unit or area of management co-extensive
with the boundaries of the Town, Urban,
or Parish Council. This will attain two
objects, both important from the point of
view of efficient management. The area
will be co-extensive with the local patriotic
spirit, and it will not be too wide to secure
effective oversight. Parish Councils we
would not exclude, for, in our opinion, the
rural parish is a convenient area, and the
parish Councils are quite competent to do
this work. It would be no more difficult

*77
work for a Parish Council to run a public
house than for a committee of working
men to manage a village co-operative store,
which they are successfully doing in hun-
dreds of cases to-day. The County Council,
for many reasons, should have no authority
in this matter. The area of its jurisdiction
is too great, and the difficulty of securing
democratic membership would be to the ad-
vantage of the brewing fraternity.

The Council, or its Committee, would frame
regulations as to time of opening and closing ;
it would fix prices and appoint the managers ;
it would purchase the stock ; it would in fact
have as much freedom of action in manage-
ment as a Tramway Committee, which works
within the four corners of its Parliamentary
powers. The Licensing Magistrates might
retain a supervising authority over the
Council in so far as to ensure that the statu-
tory conditions and limitations were not
overstepped.

The elimination of private interest in the
sale of drink demands of course that the ser-
vants in the municipal drink trade shall have
no incentive to push the sale. If the public
and the Council have imbibed the essential
idea of municipal liquor control, namely,'
that success is to be measured in losses and
not profits on the drink, there will be little
difficulty in gaining the sympathetic co-opera-
tion of the servants. Security of employment
in some occupation under the Council should

L

i 7 8
be guaranteed so long as the servants faith-
fully carry out their duties. To guard against
the possibility of corruption the retail sales-
man should have nothing whatever to do with
buying the liquor.

There are two other very important ques-
tions which demand consideration, — the
questions of profits, and of attractions.
There are those who advocate the munici-
palisation of the drink traffic as a means of
securing larger profits for the community.
Mr. Chamberlain made much of this. We
are inclined to think that the likelihood of
huge profits from the municipal public house
is much exaggerated. The monopoly value
of the license will already have been appro-
priated by the State. This is the annual
value which now goes to the brewer. The
profits which a municipality might hope to
make would have to come from the sale of
drink. The frequency of the transfer of
licenses now does not seem to indicate that
the profits of the publican are very princely.
The balance sheets of the Public House
Trusts confirm this view. Few of them have
so far succeeded in making any surplus at
all. It must be remembered that the very
reason for the municipalisation of the drink
traffic is to reduce the sale of drink to the
lowest possible dimensions. Standing ex-
penses will remain the same though the sale
of liquor falls, and the profits from the drink
sold in the municipal public houses must

179
decline if the object of municipalisation is
realised. In fact, the real test of the suc-
cess of municipalisation must be the re-
duction of profits, and every loss upon
the year's trading in liquor must be welcomed
as an evidence of the success of the
scheme. The community will look for the
compensation for this loss of public money
in the social advantage of a soberer people,
much in the same way as we find the return
for the expenditure upon drainage in the
better health of the community. When all
the licenses in a district are under municipal
control it will be easy for the Council to close
those houses which become unnecessary, or,
in other words, to keep facilities equal to a
strictly regulated demand.

The profits from other causes would be
less under municipal management. The
quality of the liquor sold would be of a
better and purer character, and the wages
paid to the servants would, we hope, be
higher than they are now under the private
traders. But assuming that the trade was
profitable, then the question would arise as
to the disposal of these profits. The method
advocated in some quarters is to put the
local profits into a national fund from which
distribution shall be made to the localities
in grants proportionate to the population,
and not in proportion to the profits the
locality earns. It is also suggested that pro-
hibition areas shall receive such grants, so

i8o

that all incentive to continue the traffic for
the 9ake of profits shall be removed. The
grants received shall be spent by the locali-
ties in providing counter attractions to the
public houses. The system adopted by the
Public House Trusts is to hand over the
profits (if any) to local charities and religious
bodies, but to exclude from participation all
objects which can claim assistance from the
rates. The idea of prohibiting the local
rates from benefiting from the profits of the
local drink traffic is to remove the possibility
of the ratepayers encouraging the traffic from
financial motives.

The question as to whether the opportu-
nities for social intercourse and recreation
ought to be provided inside the public house
or elsewhere as a counter attraction, is one
on which differences of opinion exist. The
most forceful objection to divorcing all
attractions from the public houses, and giving
to them the air of penetentiaries, is that if
men who take drink in a social way, cannot
have it in a public house with reasonable
comfort, they will form clubs to satisfy their
desires. There is a compromise possible
between the two extremes. It would be
undesirable to have attractions in connection
with the public house, which might draw
persons to whom drinking was no temptation,
but while confining the business of the public
house to the provision of refreshments
(alcoholic and temperance) it would be in-

i8i
advisable to make it so unattractive and
repulsive as to drive people who desired
alcoholic drinks to less desirable places. But
for those who want social intercourse, and
to whom the obtaining of liquor is of no
account, institutions must be provided ; and
the more attractive such are, the better
for temperance reform.

Although we do not desire to claim too
much for the partial experiments in municipal
public house keeping which have been tried,
it may be interesting to describe briefly two
of these experiments.

The first municipal public house was that
of the Birmingham Corporation at their
Waterworks in the Elan Valley in Radnor-
shire. The question of the liquor supply for
the navvies engaged in this undertaking was
settled by the Waterworks Committee of the
Birmingham Corporation themselves apply-
ing for a license for a canteen, which was
granted on the condition that a manager was
appointed who should be paid a fixed wage,
and who should have no financial interest in
the sale of drink. The Committee framed
very stringent rules as to the conduct of the
canteen. No credit was given ; no music or
games were allowed ; the bar was closed
during working hours ; the amount of liquor
a man might have in one evening was limited ;
women were not permitted to enter the bar.
The financial results were remarkable. In
three and a half years the net profits amounted

182

to £3,262. These profits were devoted to
the maintenance of the village institutions,
the school, the hospital, and the public
rooms (which proved a very effective counter
attraction to the canteen). The universal
testimony is that the management of the
canteen greatly lessened the amount of
drunkenness as compared with what might
have been expected under the ordinary
system. The Chief Constable of the county
stated, " Drunkenness in the Elan Village is
undoubtedly suppressed through the strin-
gent rules and measures adopted by the can-
teen, and further I have no hesitation in
saying that it is attributable to these regula-
tions."

The Harrogate Corporation tried a similar
experiment at their Waterworks at Scargill,
six miles from Harrogate. The rules were
very similar to those adopted at Elan, and the
results were equally satisfactory. The net
profits averaged from £700 a year. So little
drunkenness and rowdyism prevailed in the
village that the services of a policeman were
never required during the three years.

These experiments prove that a Corporation
Committee can run a public house ; that the
elimination of private profit reduces drunken
ness ; that the profits of the trade may be
put to more useful purposes. But beyond
this, they furnish little help towards the
treatment of the drink control question in our
centres of population.

183

Chapter XVII.

Advantages and Objections.

We may now sum up some of the advan-
tages which would come to the community
from the municipalisation of the drink traffic.

It would place the control of the traffic
completely in the hands of the people of the
locality. It would confer complete local option.

It would ensure that the traffic which re-
mained after local option had done all it
could to reduce facilities, would be carried on
free from the incentive of private gain.

It would free the temperance sentiment of
the locality, and enable the dimensions of the
traffic to be kept under strict control.

It would remove the influence of the liquor
interest from politics.

It would give full local option in regard
to hours of opening and closing, Sunday closing,
closing on election days.

It would give freedom to the locality to
make conditions as to the sale of liquor to
young persons.

It would dissociate gambling and immorality
from public houses.

It would give back to the community any
profits which might be made, and these
would be used to counteract the drink
temptation.

184

It would ensure better conditions of labour
for the persons employed in the trade.

It is a scheme in harmony with all the
economic and social tendencies of the time,
which point to the wisdom of public control
as the means to eliminate the admitted evils
of private profit-making.

It is a scheme, which by frankly recognising
that the demand for drink must be met, pro-
poses to meet it in such a way as to satisfy
all reasonable desire while preventing excessive
drinking.

It is a scientific and harmonious scheme
of Temperance reform, which while adapted
to present needs, is capable of progressive
re-adaptation with the growth of public senti-
ment on the question.

We propose now to deal with a number
of objections which have been put forward
to the Municipalisation of the Drink Traffic.

I. Four centuries of effort to regulate the
traffic have proved that it cannot be regulated.
It must be destroyed.

Efforts to destroy the Drink Traffic have
scarcely succeeded more brilliantly than
legislative regulation. Common sense dictates
that when a thing cannot be removed it
must be endured as best we can. Regula-
tion has failed to remove the evils of the
traffic for the same reason that regulation
has failed to remove the evils and abuses
from other trades. Past regulation has
never got to the root cause. It has left the

i8 5
traffic to be controlled and managed by deeply
interested parties who have been interested
in opposing regulation. Municipalisation
would remove the cause of the failure of mere
regulation of private interest.

2. The elimination of private profit would
not remove the desire to drink m

It was never suggested that it would. The
limitations of municipalisation have been
frankly admitted. It is not a panacea. All
that is claimed for it is, that it is the best
and only practical way of dealing with the
traffic which the public say shall exist after
the powers of restriction have been fully
exercised. The elimination of private gain
will remove all the proportion of drinking
which is due to encouragement under the
system of private license.

3. Municipalisation would substitute public
cupidity for the present private interest.

This is the only serious objection urged
by opponents of municipalisation of the
Liquor Traffic. If there were the prospects
of large profits which might ease the burden
of the ratepayers it would be a temptation
to an ignorant and short-sighted community
to encourage the traffic. But it would be
the duty of Parliament, in laying down
general conditions, to prevent the possibility
of this abuse. Such suggestions as have
already been made for the disposal of profits
would be a sufficient safeguard. The success
of any scheme depends upon the intelligence

i86
and sentiment behind it. It is reasonable to
assume that a community which municipal-
ised the Drink Traffic would do so because
it desired to reduce the evils of it to a mini-
mum. This motive would be a guarantee
that the traffic would be conducted in stfch a
way as to secure the desired effect. No
community could afford to encourage drink-
ing. It would, if it did, very soon dis-
cover that this was a suicidal policy ; that the
expense of dealing with the results of the
abuse cost more than any profit derived from
the trade.

4. The Municipalisation of the Drink
Traffic would corrupt local politics and make
this question the dominating issue at all
elections.

This objection is akin to the last. He
is possessed of a vivid imagination who can
picture the drink interest exercising a greater
influence in local and national politics than
it does to-day. The reason for this is that
the brewers and the publicans have all their
interests centred in the trade, and they fight
with all the desperation that selfishness can
generate. But if the traffic were municipalised,
no elector would have a special financial
interest in the traffic. Each individual's
financial interest would be infinitesimal.
He would have a far greater interest in keep-
ing the traffic under strict control for the
sake of the police and poor rate, as well as
for the general welfare. The drink question
would be but one of the many interests the

i8 7
elector would have, and his interest in that
would be merged in the general questions
of municipal government. The addition of
this work to the duties of the local author-
ity would attract men of public spirit into
the public service, and the community would
realise the need of such men for such an
important work. The Municipalisation of
the Drink Traffic would liberate local govern-
ment from the influence of the men who now
make " their trade their politics."

5. It would implicate every citizen in such
an unholy traffic. '

It would do this to no greater extent than
every citizen is implicated to-day. We cannot
denude ourselves of participation in the
traffic. The liquor traffic is the largest con-
tributor to the national revenue, and every
teetotaller is implicated to that extent. The
Temperance party are unanimous in support-
ing the transfer of the monopoly value of
the licenses to the community ; that is, they
demand that they and their fellow citizens
shall own the public house licenses. But we
do not blame the teetotaller for being
anxious to own public house licenses. It is
a duty he cannot escape. So it is with the
municipalisation. The duty of every citizen
is to help to make the best of things he may
not like but cannot abolish. It is the duty of
the teetotaller to support that scheme of
control of the liquor traffic which offers the
best prospect of reducing its evils to the
lowest dimensions. If municipalisation will

188
do this, then the teetotaller who prevents
this plan from being adopted is responsible
for all the evils of the traffic which continue
to exist, and which might have been removed
by adopting the suggested course. We do not
get rid of our responsibility for an evil by
refusing to control it. We neglect our duty,
and we are morally responsible for the con-
sequences of the neglect.

6. The drink would be the same evil thing
served for profit or for the public " good."

No, it would not be the same evil thing.
At least we hope not. Unless the municipal
public house sold more wholesome drink
than is often retailed now, it is possible that
the municipal drink question would be an
influence to some extent at the local elections.
But this is one of the many silly objections to
the proposal. It is not a question of whether
drink is good or bad, whether State prohibi-
tion is better than Local Option ; the question
is whether, if we must have public houses,
it is better they should be owned by the
people or by the brewers.

7. It would give greater respectability to
drinking

No. The fact that it had been placed
under public control because it was liable
to be a serious evil, and that the sale was
hedged round with so many regulations, would
be a standing proof that it was a trade which
required very careful watching to keep it
respectable.

189

8. It would not be a permanent settlement
of the drink question.

We sincerely hope not. We claim no
finality for it. But we do maintain that it will
assist further temperance reform. The semi-
public control in Sweden and No way has
done this. The system has encouraged tem-
perance to such an extent that some of the
towns no longer require the presence of the
liquor shop. Municipalisation would not
fasten the liquor traffic on the community
any more than the building of a fever hospital
may be said to fasten small-pox on the com-
munity. An intelligent people would willingly
sacrifice any small capital which might be
invested in public houses, if the temperance
sentiment had become so widespread that
the need for the houses no longer existed.

There is no fatal objection against the
municipalisation of the drink traffic. It is
a proposal eminently calculated to appeal to
the moderate men of all classes — the men
who, while prepared to support any proposal
which may lessen excessive drinking, are
not willing to restrict the traffic so as to make
it difficult or impossible to satisfy a reason-
able desire. The scheme has the support
of the most impartial of living temperance
reformers — Lord Peel, the chairman of the
Royal Commission on Licensing. Speaking
at the third annual meeting of the Central
Temperance Legislation Board, October, 1902,

he said : —

Publichouse Trust Companies he candidly owned
he did not like. It was said that the aim was the
elimination of private profit. True, the man behind
the counter of a Trust public-house might have no
personal interest in the sale of liquor, but a number
of other private individuals would profit, and 5 per
cent, was not a bad return on capital in these days.
If this trust extended, the diminution of licenses would
be rendered even more difficult. If he were driven
to the point he would rather seek a solution in municipal
than in private management. He would like to
see some great city like Manchester, Liverpool, or
Birmingham, to which the power was legally en-
trusted — giving a time notice to all the public-houses
within its boundaries, at the end of which time the
municipalities would have a free hand to deal with
the houses as they thought fit and work them, not
for the benefit of the city, so far as the profits were
concerned, but for the better management of the city
itself. He had great faith in the municipalities of
the country.

It may be that public opinion is not yet
ripe for any extensive experiment on the
lines we have been suggesting, but the time
is certainly most favourable for an energetic
educational work to fit the people for their
serious responsibilities in this matter of the
public control of the Drink Traffic.

The concentration of the retail sale of
liquor in the hands of the community would
probably lead to the municipal or national
control of the sources of supply.

The sale of liquor in clubs would require to
be strictly regulated ; but with ample facilities
for social recreation, provided by the muni-
cipality, the need for private institutions of
such a character would almost disappear.

191

Chapter XIX
Conclusion.

The treatment of the Drink Evil is no longer
left to the Temperance organisations. The
responsibility for it is felt by all sections of
society. In this recognition of the evil and
of social responsibility is the hope of temper-
ance reform.

There is no short cut to universal abstinence.
The relation of the drink question to the whole
social problem is now being recognised by
reformers of all schools. In so far as we elevate
the ideals of the people, lessen the strenuousness
of commercial and industrial life, improve the
surroundings of the poor, increase their leisure
and provide rational entertainment, so far
shall we be working most effectively for tem-
perance reform.

At the same time, the evils of the drink
traffic may be lessened, indeed reduced to a
minimum, by the elimination of the incentive of \
private gain, and by the removal of other I
temptations and encoura geme nts to drink.
The schemes of reform which we have advo-
cated in this little volume are not put forward
as proposals for the immedia te establishment
of a teetotal Utopia. 'iney~take facFs and fr

192

conditions as they are, and seek to apply to
them the methods suggested by experience.
jln such a great question as this the wisest
I of us are but as learners. It is a wise policy
lto hasten slowly, to be guided by experience;
and all that is claimed for our proposals is that
taken together they form a harmonious and
Scientific scheme of temperance reform, emi-
nently practicable. If carried out, they will
prepare the way for greater possibilities.

193

APPENDIX I.

Resolution carried on 20th September, 1907, at the
meeting of the German Socialist Congress, held at
Essen.

" The dangers to the workmen arising from alco-
holism have grown with the development of
Capitalism. All these conditions which have helped
to make him poorer have also tended to increase
his desire to drink too much, and have made the
satisfaction of this desire more dangerous, — such
conditions, for example, as excessive hours of work,
insufficient pay, and insanitary dwellings and
workshops. Through this industrial and social
disorganisation, and the. drinking habits thereby
engendered, the workman is forced and accustomed
to the inordinate use of alcohol. This habit of
drinking has also this peculiarity, that when it be-
comes confirmed, he loses the power any longer to
control it. The middle-class Temperance advocate,
as a rule, looks on drink and his own evil habit as
the cause of the drunkard's misfortune, and — not
wholly without design — he ignores any study of the
original industrial and social conditions in which
the man's thirst arose. On the other hand, he
tries by coercive and penal laws, to force the so-
called evil will of the drunkard, and, as a conse-
quence of such laws, the latter has to pay twice over
for a guilt originally brought on by the conditions
of the society under which he lives. Capitalism
and the State, the partners of responsibility, have
only this amount of interest in the drink question,
that they suffer harm through the ruin of the workman
and his diminished productive power.

Therefore this Congress Resolves —

" That the evils of alcohol can neither be removed
nor palliated by coercive or penal laws nor by the im-
position of restrictive taxation. Such coercive
laws only amount in the end to restrictive legisla-

M

194
tion aimed at the poorer class of the community,
while the rich easily escape from their consequences.
The drunkard ought not to be surrendered to the
lawyer, but, like every other sick person, should be
taken in hand by the physician. Public homes for
inebriates under medical superintendence should be
erected and supported out of public funds. The
limitation of public houses will only drive the drunkard
from open indulgence in the tavern to private drinks
in his own home. Taxes on the lighter alcoholic
drink only force on an increased consumption of brandy.
But the higher the tax on brandy, the more the poorer
people who cannot to any large extent diminish its
consumption, are plundered.

"As a means of combating this evil, the Congress
recommends : — (i) Shortening of the working day to
8 hours at most. (2) The abolition of night work, or
at least reasonable shifts of duty at night with suffi-
cient intervals of rest. (3) Abolition of the truck
system in alcohol. (4) Abolition of grocers' licenses
and small clubs. (5) Increased sanitation of the
workroom and more humane methods ' of work. (6)
Protective legislation for children, young people
and women. (7) Adequate wages. (8) Aboli-
tion of those protective taxes which increase the cost
of land and living. (9) Extension of public
schools in accordance with the resolution of the
Mannheim Conference. (10) A thorough Housing
scheme with People's Palaces, reading halls, and
public recreation grounds. (11) Also, the Trade
Unions are recommended to get rid of everything
that encourages drinking in their meetings, while at
the same time, by word and writing, they enlighten
the children and young people as to the mis-
chievous effects arising from the misuse of alcohol.
Children must be prevented from being served with
alcohol. Not only then will they engage in the old
conflict against the real evils of drinking, but
the class conscious political and industrial organi-

195
sations of the working class movement will seek
to improve their industrial condition ; and, instead
of seeking, in the misuse of alcohol, solace and for-
getfulness, they will encourage a fight against Capit-
alism. As a result of this conflict they hope to abolish
poverty and industrial enslavement, and to find Con-
tentment, satisfaction, and joy."

Resolution carried unanimously at the Austrian
Socialist Congress, held at Vienna, 13th November,
1903.

" This Congress recognises in the drinking habits
of the people a serious obstacle in the way of the
successful prosecution of the Labour struggle and
an immense drawback in the way of efficient Social-
ist organisation. No ways should therefore be left
untried of grappling with the serious evil.

" The first way of working in this direction is to
improve the economic environment of the people ;
and in order that this may be effective, it is necessary
to enlighten the people on the injurious and destruc-
tive effects of alcohol.

" The Congress therefore recommends to all its
branches and to every comrade to encourage every
movement that tends to discourage the drinking
habit, and to abolish, as an important step towards
this result, the sale of drink at all meetings of the
party. The comrades who are total abstainers are
recommended specially to take part in the agitation
in the temperance societies ; and these latter on
their part ought to take care that members do not
neglect their duty to their political and industrial
organisations."

196
APPENDIX II.

MODERN CONDITIONS OF LABOUR AND
DRINKING.

To ascertain to what extent workmen break time
through drink, the writer addressed the following four
questions to a number of representative commercial
men and Trade Union officials.
The questions were : —
No. i. — What percentage of your men are absent from
work on a Monday morning, on the average, through
week-end drinking ?
No. 2. — Has there been a tendency to less broken time
and greater sobriety among the men during the
last twenty years, and, if so, what, in your opinion,
is the reason ?
No. 3. — Do you think the discipline of modern indus-
try, requiring the close attendance of the men at
their duties, is conducive to less drinking ?
No. 4. — What percentage of your men are annually
discharged through drinking ?

The replies given in regard to a syndicate in a textile
trade, employing 5,000 men, every one of whom is a
Trade Unionist, were as follows : —
No. 1. — Not more than i per cent.
No. 2. Yes. Drink evil very marked at one time.

Twenty years ago it was a distinct evil.
No. 3. — Better type of employfc; increased wages
(20 per cent, up in 20 years) ; employment more
regular ; discipline keener.
No. 4. — In six months of 1907 only eight dismissals
through drink.
A City Tramways Manager, with 1,050 workmen,
replies : —
No. 1. — Cases unknown.

197

No. 2. — Company management ended in 1902. Drink
was a much greater evil then. Corporation
management, by virtue of instituting better con-
ditions (much less hours and actually increased
wages) obtained better discipline, better type of
men, and quickly broke up the drink evil. Sobriety
of men now excellent.

No. 3. — Discipline and close attendance begets a better
type of workman when accompanied also by
better conditions.

No. 4. — In 1907. — 4 cases.

An engineering firm (Manchester), employing nearly
2,000 men, reply : —

No. 1. — Absent 1*5. Through drink: — None.

No. 2. — Undoubtedly so ; due, I think, to a desire
for a better condition, which has been hastened
by education, the creation of ideals, the healthier
enjoyments catered for, the facilities of travelling,
and the desire of possession.

No. 3. — Yes. Employers cannot afford to have ma-
chinery standing idle through the non-attendance
of drinking men when steady and reliable men are
requisite. Now-a-days, men have come more into
line, due to strict supervision and discipline, which
is enforced to a greater extent than formerly.
Absence from work or neglect of duty entails dis-
missal, and workmen realise the difficulty of get-
ting fresh employment under those conditions.

No. 4. — Two only were discharged for drunkenness
during 1907.

The General Manager of one of the largest English
railways, who made a very close enquiry into the
questions, replied : —
No. 1. — No actual data is available ; but the answer

is " practically nil."
No. 2. — Sobriety has certainly increased amongst the
Company's employes during the period mentioned.
This is considered to be largely due to improve-
ment in the general conditions of life and education,

198

the spead of Temperance principles, and the

exercise of a stricter discipline over the staff
No. 3. — This is dealt with in the reply to the preceding

question.
No. 4. — The approximate percentage of men annually

discharged for drunkenness is '09.

The General Secretary of the largest Trade Union in
the Iron Trade replied : —

No. 1. — Probably from 2 J to 5 per cent.

No. 2. — There has been a great improvement in the last
20 years, I think, mainly due to education. But
there is another thing, specialisation. At one
time, as you know, we had all-round mechanics,
who used to shift about from one place to another,
and they had a good deal more of the independent
spirit prevailing amongst them, than there is among
those specialised and tied to a particular operation,
conscious all the time of helplessness outside that
operation. This has had, therefore, a tendency to
greater sobriety, and, at the same time, greater
timidity. As to whether one good balances the
other evil that is a matter that I will leave to you
to consider.

No. 3. — I should say that probably you are right about
discipline as to effect as stated. But while dis-
cipline may be conducive to less drinking during
working time, I am afraid it has a contrary effect
at other times. I mean to say, that the man who
is drilled to discipline at work during the day is
not unlikely to be a very self-relying sort of chap
away from work.

No. 4. — Must be very small.

A coal owner (Scotland) employing over 4,000 men,
replies as follows > —
No. 1. — The percentage of our miners absent from work
on Monday morning is larger after pay Saturday
(which is fortnightly), but, on the whole, can be put
at 10 per cent.
No. 2. — Our Managers do not think there is a tendency

199
to less broken time and greater sobriety among the
workmen during the last 20 years. Sobriety or
the reverse depends greatly on rate of wages. At
present wages are high, miners making 8s. and 9s.
per day, and having more to spend. They spend
too much on drink when wages are high.
No. 3. — The discipline of modern industry does not
apply so much to miners as to other classes of work-
men, engineers, etc. They are the most independent
men on the face of the earth, and, though a miner
is off work, he is not dismissed. His working
place is there, and unless it falls greatly behind
through idle time, he does as he pleases. I would
say, however, that where machines work the coal,
instead of the men, the miners who attend the
machines are much more steady, as they must be
out regularly, or the machines would stand, and
great expense would be incurred.
No. 4. — We don't dismiss them for drinking, so can't
give a percentage.
Speaking at the annual meeting of the United King-
dom Alliance, on October 15th, 1907, Mr. Lloyd George,
M.P., said : " It was found from enquiries amongst
employers, that on Monday morning, about 25 to 75 per
cent, of their workpeople did not turn up owing to drink,
and when they did come back to work they • had muddy
intellects and impaired vitality." Mr. Lloyd George
afterwards corrected himself : "I ought to have said
5 to 75 per cent. Whatever I actually said that is what
I meant to say. Seventy-five per cent, is an outside
figure, and there are not many of these. But 25 per cent,
is reported to the Board of Trade by employers in many
cases ; in other instances the percentage sinks to 5."

The " Birmingham Daily Post," on October 17th,
the " Scotsman," of October 18th, the " Yorkshire
Evening Post," of October 18th and 21st, and the
" Morning Advertiser," of October 25th, published re-
ports of investigations made into the accuracy of Mr.
Lloyd George's statement. No employer could be
found to confirm Mr. Lloyd George's statement.

200
APPENDIX III.

SHORTER HOURS AND TEMPERANCE.

Sir John Brunner (Brunner, Mond, and Co.) in
reply to an enquiry as to the effect of the Eight Hours
Day on sobriety, has kindly supplied us with a large
amount of striking testimony. He says : —

" It is impossible to show the improvement by actual
figures, but everyone who has known the works long
enough to be able to compare the old conditions with
the new, is agreed as to the immense change for the
better. The loss of time under the old conditions
was almost entirely caused by insobriety.

"Since the introduction of shorter hours, the time
lost by the men has greatly declined, and for 1906 was
as follows : —

Tradesmen Other daymen. Shiftmen.

Days per year. Days per year. Days per year.
0*2 0*3 0*4

"In 1892 (before the adoption of shorter hours), the
lost time was : —

Tradesmen 12*6 days.

Other Daymen 6*6 days.

Shift men 2*9 days."

Sir John Brunner gives very striking figures, showing
the improved health, the growth of the Co-operative
Societies, etc., since the adoption of the Shorter Working
Day.

Sir William Mather (Mather and Piatt, Salford Iron
Works) has very kindly supplemented by recent facts
the information he published in 1894, as to the results of
his experience of the Eight Hours Day. After twelve
months' experience, the departmental managers wrote :
" During the past twelve months I am glad to be able
to report none of my men have come to work under the

201

influence of drink. The case in this respect formerly
was bad."

" I have no fault to And with the men as to steadiness
and sobriety. There is great improvement in that
respect."

Sir William Mather (writing to us 14 years later,
January 14th, 1908) says : —

"The experience of the foremen given in 1894 may be
taken as the present condition of habit and conduct of
the men. Notwithstanding the fluctuations in employ-
ment, and the changing of men from time to time,
consequent on the state of trade, our foremen inform
me now that it is rare indeed that we have to complain
of any conduct arising from drink.

" Our works were at onetime beset with publichouses,
being situated in the most densely populated and poorest
parts of the town of Salf ord. During the last 1 5 years
many public-houses have been abolished in the borough
and during the last five years at least 50 have succumbed
to the better habits of working men. Pari passu
with the movement, the number of places of amuse-
ment, at which there is no drink license, has more than
doubled, and the drinking places are decidedly less fre-
quented. We are informed that men are now accom-
panied by their wives and children in enjoying the
amusements offered, whereas, in resorting to the
public-house, the men were alone. We have a large
institute connected with the works in Salford, in
which are carried on various societies established by
the men themselves, such as " ambulance classes,"
and the " Pleasant Sunday Afternoons," " Band of
Hope," etc., which, though not confined to the work-
people, are largely supported by them. One of our
Managers in a very superior position, who came to me as
a boy, and who knows the history of these works for the
last 30 years, states : — ' All the questions in Mr. Snow-
den's letter as to improvement in sobriety may safely
be answered in the affirmative.' "

202

INDEX.

Accrington, 136.

Aged Poor, Royal Commission on, 90.

Arrests for Drunkenness, 4. • .

Asquith, Mr., 138.

Austrian Socialists, 32 ; Appendix I. :•..'•

Bands of Hope, 23.

Beer, Origin of, 18.

Belgian Socialists, 32.

Bessbrook, 134.

Birmingham, 163, 181.

Booth, Chas., 59, 87, 90, 92, 95.

Brewers for Sale, 172.

Broadbent, Sir William, 13.

Broken Time ; Appendix II.

Bronardel, Dr., 14.

Bunge, Prof., 12.

Burns, Dr. Dawson, 34, 103, 108.

Burns, Mr. J., 48, 55, 87.

Burt, Mr. Thos., 28.

Campbell-Bannerman, Sir H., 93.

Canada, 127.

Cancer, 14.

Causes of Drinking, 71.

Chamberlain, Mr. J., 90, 163, 178.

Chancellor of Exchequer, 74, 109.

Chemical Workers, 64.

Children, Deficient, 11.

Clubs, 138.

Coats' Syndicate, 107.

Coleridge, Lord, 7.

Consumption of Drink, in U.S.A., '125 ; in Canada,

127 ; in New Zealand, 130.
Convictions, 61.
Co-operative Societies, 26.

203

Coroners on Drink, 7.

Cotton Trade and Employment, 104.

Cotton Workers and Health, 62.

Crime, 4.

Dawson, Rev. W. J., 114.

Deaths from Drink, 14.

Disease, Drink and, Medical Report on, 9.

Disinterested Management, 139.

Drink Bill, 34, 103 ; in United States, 125 ; New Zea-
land, 131.

Drunkenness and Crime, 4 ; Arrests, 4 ; in Liverpool, 5.

Durham, Housing in, 61.

Elan Canteen, 181.

Employment, 85, 103.

Epilepsy, 10.

Expenditure upon Drink, 34. (See Wages and Drink
BUI.)

Foreign Trade, 103.

German Socialists, 32 ; Appendix I.

Gill, A. H., 29.

Gin Drinking, 19.

Gladstone, Mr. H., 112.

Gladstone, W. E., 136.

Gothenburg System, 140.

Gould, Dr., 148.

Grantham, Judge, 6, 62.

Harcourt, Sir Wm„ in.

Harrogate Canteen, 182.

Hayler, G„ 116.

Hime, Dr., 59.

Housing, 58, 62, 78.

Hoyle, Wm„ 108.

Idiocy, 10.

Income Tax, 104.

Industrial Revolution, 20.

Insurance Companies, 15.

Kansas, 116.

Labour Party, 29, 3a

Lawrence, Judge, 83.

204

Lawson, Sir Wilfrid, no.

Leif Jones, 112.

Liquor Trade and Unemployment, 105, 106.

Liverpool, 5.

Local Option, no, 112, 119 ; in United States, 124;
in Canada, 126 ; in New Zealand, 128 ; in Aus-
tralia, 131 ; at Home, 133.

Lunacy, 10, 16.

Macdonnell, Sir John, 5.

Maine, 113, 116.

Malins, J., 116.

Mayors, Teetotal 22.

Medical Petition, 80.

Mining, 38 ; Appendix II.

Neale Dow, 166.

Nelson, 136.

New York, Report of Medical'Academy, n.

Norway, 141, 145.

Occupations, 38.

Peel, Lord, 189.

Permissive Bill, no.

Physical Deterioration, Report of Committee on, 8,
59, 62.

Placards, Temperance, 81.

Port Sunlight, 136, 157.

Poverty, 49, 86.

Prohibition States, 114.

Railways, 107.

Recreation, 82 ; Appendix III.

Rent, 1 01, 102.

Rowntree, S„ 88.

Scottish Temperance League, 147.

Sexton, J., 31.

Shorter Hours, 74; Appendix IIL

Shuttleworth, Dr., 10.

Small Holdings, 84.

Socialists, Continental, 31.

Steadman, W. C, 29.

Suckling, 12.

20$

Sullivan, Dr., 10.

Sweden, 141, 145,

Temperance Societies, 21, 22.

Temperance Teaching, 8a

Textile Trades, 37.

Thorold Rogers, 94.

Time Limit, 1 59,

Toxteth, 102, 134.

Trades Unions, 25 ; Fellowship, 28.

Trust Companies, 149.

Wages Spent on Drink, 63, 85.

Warner, Prot, 89.

White, Sir Geo., 85, 91, 103, 105.

Whittaker, Sir T. P., 35, 86, 92.

Whyte, Jas„ 108, 123.

Women and Drink, 41, 56.

Printed at The Worker Press, Market St., Huddersfield.

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